Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

Issues in Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

Series editors: Pol Vandevelde, Marquette University, USA, and

Kevin Hermberg, Dominican College, New York, USA

Issues in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics presents original research work

that appeals to the phenomenological method while also being informed
by the tradition of hermeneutics. The books in this series abide by the
rigor of traditional Husserlian phenomenology and bridge the gap between
philosophical, religious, literary, and legal hermeneutics. Informed by current
debates within both these fields, the series advances and promotes dialogue
between the two movements.

Titles in the series:

Epistemology, Archaeology, Ethics,
Edited by Pol Vandevelde and Sebastian Luft
Variations on Truth, Edited by Pol Vandevelde and
Kevin Hermberg
Towards an Epistemology of Ruptures, Arun Iyer
Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

Edited by
Kevin Hermberg and Paul Gyllenhammer

Issues in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics

LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

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First published 2013

© Kevin Hermberg, Paul Gyllenhammer and Contributors, 2013

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 Contents

Notes on Contributors vii

Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics: An Introduction Kevin Hermberg 1

Part I Phenomenology and the Tradition

1 Phainomenon and Logos in Aristotle’s Ethics Lawrence J. Hatab 9

2 “Disimpropriation” and Infused Virtue: The Question

of (Christian) Virtue Ethics in the Phenomenology of
Michel Henry Michelle Rebidoux 29

3 Being and Virtuousness: Toward a Platonic-Heideggerian

Virtue Ethics Matthew King 45

4 Horizon Intentionality and Aristotelian Friendship

Eric Chelstrom 60

5 Value, Affectivity, and Virtue in Aristotle, Scheler, and

von Hildebrand Gregory B. Sadler 78

Part II Theoretical and Contemporary Comparative Accounts

6 Phenomenology, Eudaimonia, and the Virtues John J. Drummond 97

7 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics: Complementary

Antitheoretical Methodological and Ethical Trajectories?
Jack Reynolds 113

8 Virtues, Values, and the Heart: The Phenomenology of

Scheler and von Hildebrand Robert E. Wood 132

9 The Self that Recedes: A Phenomenology of Virtue

J. Jeremy Wisnewski 147
vi Contents

Part III Application of Phenomenology as a Virtue Discipline

10 The Virtues of Agency: A Phenomenology of Confidence,

Courage, and Creativity John Russon 165

11 Heideggerian Perfectionism and the Phenomenology of the

Pedagogical Truth Event Iain Thomson 180

12 Descent to the Things Themselves: The Virtue of Dissent

John Duncan 191

13 Correlates of the Good Life: Body, Wilderness, and Expertise

Paul Gyllenhammer 212

References 227
Index 239
 Notes on Contributors

Eric Chelstrom is visiting assistant professor of philosophy at Minnesota State

University Moorhead. He is the editor of Being Amongst Others: Phenomenological
Reflections on the Life-world (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006) and author of
Social Phenomenology: Husserl, Intersubjectivity, and Collective Intentionality
(Lexington Books, 2012).

John J. Drummond is professor of philosophy and Robert Southwell, S. J.

Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Fordham University. He has written
extensively on Husserl’s theory of intentionality, focusing more recently on how
to develop his account into a theory of evaluative and volitional intentionality.
Among his publications are Historical Dictionary of Husserl’s Philosophy
(Scarecrow, 2008) and Husserlian Intentionality and Non-Foundational Realism:
Noema and Object (Kluwer, 1990).

John Duncan is director of the Ethics, Society, and Law program at Trinity
College, University of Toronto. He is founder of the journal PhaenEx, author
of articles on philosophy and politics, including a feature on casualties in
Afghanistan re-published in Best Canadian Essays: 2011 (Tightrope Books), and
coeditor of Rousseau and Desire (Univ. of Toronto Press, 2009).

Paul Gyllenhammer is associate professor of philosophy at St. John’s University.

He has published articles on Sartre’s ethics and notion of shame, the question
of tolerance in Heidegger, the topic of normality in Husserl and Foucault, and
Ricoeur’s theory of narrative. He has served as Chair of the Editorial Board
and is currently the Managing Editor of PhaenEx: Journal of Existential and
Phenomenological Theory and Culture.

Lawrence J. Hatab is Louis I. Jaffe Professor of Philosophy and Eminent Scholar

at Old Dominion University. He is the author of several books, including
Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality: An Introduction (Cambridge University
Press, 2008), Nietzsche’s Life Sentence: Coming to Terms With Eternal Recurrence
(Routledge, 2005), and Ethics and Finitude: Heideggerian Contributions to Moral
Philosophy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).
viii Notes on Contributors

Kevin Hermberg is associate professor of philosophy at Dominican College. He

specializes in Husserl and the intersections of phenomenology with other fields
within philosophy, recently publishing on Husserl and Social Epistemology.
He is the author of Husserl’s Phenomenology: Knowledge, Objectivity, and
Others (Continuum, 2006) and coeditor of Variations on Truth: Contemporary
Phenomenological Approaches (Continuum, 2011).

Matthew King is sessional instructor of philosophy at York University in

Toronto, Canada. He specializes in Ancient Greek and Continental Philosophy
and is the author of Heidegger and Happiness: Dwelling on Fitting and Being
(Continuum, 2009).

Michelle Rebidoux is visiting assistant professor in the Department of Religious

Studies at Memorial University of Newfoundland. She has published articles
and reviews in the areas of ethics, phenomenology, philosophy of religion,
comparative religious thought, and the history of Christianity. She authored The
Philosophy of Michel Henry (1922-2002): A French Christian Phenomenology of
Life (Edwin Mellen Press, 2012).

Jack Reynolds is associate professor of philosophy at La Trobe University,

Australia. His published books include Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: Intertwining
Embodiment and Alterity (Ohio UP, 2004), Understanding Existentialism
(Acumen, 2006), and Chronopathologies: Time and Politics in Deleuze, Derrida,
Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology (Lexington, 2011). He is coeditor of
several volumes, including Understanding Derrida (Continuum, 2004).

John Russon is professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph. He has

published many articles on topics in Ancient Philosophy and in Contemporary
Continental Philosophy and has authored several books, including Bearing
Witness to Epiphany: Persons, Things and the Nature of Erotic Life (State University
of New York Press, 2009) and Human Experience: Philosophy, Neurosis and the
Elements of Everyday Life (State University of New York Press, 2003).

Gregory B. Sadler teaches philosophy at Marist College. He is the author of over

two dozen articles and book chapters. His most recent book is Reason Fulfilled
by Revelation: The 1930’s Christian Philosophy Debates in France (Catholic
University of America Press, 2011).
 Notes on Contributors ix

Iain Thomson is professor of philosophy at the University of New Mexico. He is

the author of numerous articles and books, including Heidegger on Ontotheology:
Technology and the Politics of Education (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and
Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity (Cambridge University Press, 2011). He is
featured in the 2010 film Being in the World.

J. Jeremy Wisnewski is associate professor of philosophy at Hartwick College.

He has written widely on issues in moral philosophy, applied ethics, and
phenomenology. His books include Wittgenstein and Ethical Inquiry (Continuum,
2007), The Politics of Agency (Ashgate, 2008), and Understanding Torture (EUP,
2010). He is coeditor of Ethics and Phenomenology (Lexington, 2012) and editor
of the Review Journal of Political Philosophy.

Robert Wood is professor of philosophy in the Institute of Philosophic Studies

at the University of Dallas. From 1989 to 2009, he was editor of the American
Catholic Philosophical Quarterly. His Placing Aesthetics: Reflections on the
Philosophic Tradition received a Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award
in 2000. He has published almost 70 articles in esthetics, metaphysics, and
anthropology.
x
 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics:
An Introduction
Kevin Hermberg

Phenomenology and virtue ethics? To some, the pairing of these two traditions
in one volume of chapters might seem forced or artificial. After all, most
versions of virtue ethics trace their roots to ancient Greek philosophy, whereas
phenomenology did not become prominent until the twentieth century with the
work of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). Putting aside the centuries separating
the roots of phenomenology and virtue ethics, and focusing on the normative
dimension, it might appear that the two traditions have little to offer each other.
When discussing Husserl’s phenomenology in relation to various approaches
to ethics, Henning Peucker notes that if we confront Husserlian ethics with
the popular categories of normative ethics (i.e., virtue ethics, deontological
ethics, consequentialist theories), “we will find that it does not fit” (Peucker
2008, 307).
On the other hand, to continue with Peucker, Husserl’s ethics incorporates
“elements of all three of these types of ethical theories and combines them in
a way that is both historically and systematically fruitful” (Peucker 2008, 307).
Like Peucker, Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl notes the resemblance of Husserl’s mature
or “second” ethics and Aristotelian virtue ethics (Rinofner-Kreidl 2010, 188).
As the so-called mature or second of Husserl’s ethics is an ethics of the person,
there should be no surprise that there is a sense in which both phenomenology
and virtue ethics focus on a first-person point of view and on the person. While
phenomenology is the study of phenomena—the study of experience from a
first-person point of view—an investigation of virtues is an investigation of
a particular sort of experience. Virtues are not characteristics or habits that
are tangential to the agent or experience. A virtue, as Rosalind Hursthouse
summarizes, is “a character trait—that is, a disposition which is well entrenched
in its possessor, something that, as we say ‘goes all the way down,’ unlike a habit
2 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

such as being a tea-drinker” (Hursthouse 2012, §2). So, to study the virtues is to
study the experiences and disposition of agents and that is, in one sense at least,
to do a sort of phenomenology.
Such superficial parallels are not the motivation for this volume of chapters.
There are more substantial connections and similarities such that work in one of
the traditions can help explorations and clarifications in the other. For example,
Burt Hopkins argues that Aristotle’s two ways of seeing phantasmata are
“remarkably similar to Husserl’s description of the natural and transcendental-
phenomenological attitudes” (Hopkins 2010, 120). Careful elucidation of the
one may shed new light on the other (cf. Peucker 2008, 324).
While phenomenology is usually understood as a descriptive discipline
showing how essential features of the human encounter with things and people
in the world are articulated, we are reminded that phenomenology is also based
on and related to ethical concerns. However, these ethical concerns and the role
phenomenology might play in ethical considerations “by offering analyses of
the structure of will, valuing, happiness, and care for others (in empathy and
sympathy)” have been largely “on the horizon of phenomenology” rather than
front and center (Smith 2011, §5). Although ethics, generally speaking, might
benefit from phenomenological investigations, virtue ethics is a tradition that
is particularly well suited to the depth descriptions of phenomenology. After
all, supporters of virtue ethics emphasize “the need to describe how moral
agents acquire or develop the traits and abilities necessary to become morally
able agents” (Christensen 2009, 493). Such descriptions, however, are largely
unthematized in the current literature on phenomenology. This volume initiates
a conversation with virtue ethicists that is underrepresented in the current
literature.

Organization of the volume

The volume is organized into three parts. The first part explores direct
relationships or overlap between phenomenology (or its major figures) and
traditional virtue ethics (or its major figures). The second part offers theoretical
accounts of virtue from the phenomenological perspective and comparisons
between contemporary phenomenologists’ sense of virtue. The third part of the
volume moves from theory toward application of phenomenology as a virtuous
discipline.
 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics: An Introduction 3

Part I: Phenomenology and the tradition

The chapters in this part of the volume explore direct relationships or overlap
between phenomenology or major phenomenologists such as Husserl,
Heidegger, Henry, Gurwitsch, Scheler, and von Hildebrand and traditional
virtue ethics, whether ancient Greek or Christian, or its major figures: Plato
and Aristotle.
●● Lawrence J. Hatab opens the volume with the suggestion that, in the
exploration of phenomenology and virtue ethics, we should start with
Aristotle “as the first phenomenologist who thought about virtue.” Hatab
explores Aristotle as a phenomenologist, offers a reading of Aristotle’s ethics,
and puts that reading into conversation with Aristotle’s practical syllogism
and the role of deliberation in virtuous living.
●● Michelle Rebidoux moves the discussion into the Christian tradition of
virtue ethics by means of a careful treatment of the question of virtue ethics
in the phenomenology of Michel Henry. The key to both Henry’s ethics and
his phenomenology, Rebidoux argues, is a move to a phenomenology of Life
rather than of the world.
●● Matthew King engages the Platonic aspect of traditional virtue ethics by
sketching a virtue ethics inspired by both Plato and Heidegger. King shows
the promise of combining the insights of these thinkers in order to “arrive
at a virtue ethics that is acceptable because its account of the virtues is
grounded in an account of the good.”
●● Eric Chelstrom offers a careful discussion of the notion of “horizon” in
Husserlian phenomenology, particularly the temporal horizon. Chelstrom
applies the concept of intentional horizons to a central concept in
classical virtue ethics and uses it as a means for better understanding
Aristotle’s concepts of self-love and complete friendship between virtuous
persons.
●● Gregory B. Sadler builds upon a connection between an important
theme in interpretation of Aristotelian virtue ethics and corresponding
developments in certain traditions of phenomenology. On both sides,
there is realization and exploration of the importance of all the affective
dimensions and phenomena of human existence, an importance which
has been often ignored or overlooked by modern thought. Sadler
approaches the affective dimensions through Aristotle, Scheler, and von
Hildebrand.
4 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

Part II: Theoretical and contemporary comparative accounts

Chapters in this part of the volume offer both theoretical accounts of virtue from
the phenomenological perspective and comparisons between contemporary
phenomenologists’ sense of virtue. Authors in this part of the volume refer to the
tradition of virtue ethics as articulated in the first part of the volume, but their
focus is on contemporary debates and on the relevance of phenomenological
method today.
●● John J. Drummond considers a phenomenological response to the critique
that because of its goal of providing a descriptive account of the structures
of intentionality, phenomenology cannot bridge the gap between the
descriptive and the normative. Drummond shows that, despite the criticism,
there is room in phenomenology for both eudaimonism and a normative
account of the virtues.
●● Jack Reynolds extends the suggestions of Hubert Dreyfus and Charles
Taylor to argue that, when it comes to moral flourishing and the importance
of character, there are proximities, both methodological and ethical,
between phenomenology and virtue ethics. Reynolds suggests that, taken
together, phenomenology and virtue ethics offer some ways of “thinking
about ethics that promise to be mutually enlightening.”
●● Robert E. Wood explores the early phenomenologists Max Scheler and
Dietrich von Hildebrand, focusing on their understanding of virtues, values,
and the heart. Wood argues that these thinkers “opened up new avenues
for thought regarding the virtues,” and he shows that what makes possible
the heart’s power to perceive and act in response to positive value is the
acquisition of virtues and reverence is the key to a virtuous life.
●● J. Jeremy Wisnewski works to “capture the phenomenology of virtue” by
means of the theoretical and practical descriptions of virtue. Drawing on
the descriptions of virtue from Aristotle and the concept of flow experience
from Csikszentmihalyi, Wisnewski provides “a model of virtue as a kind
of perceptual expertise” that is largely nondeliberative and valuable for its
own sake.

Part III: Application of phenomenology as a virtue discipline

The chapters in this part of the volume take a step away from the theoretical/
argumentative approach of the chapters in Part II and toward more applied
 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics: An Introduction 5

accounts of phenomenology as a virtuous discipline. The basis of each chapter is

on the way that the practice of phenomenology offers the practitioner an avenue
into “the good life.”
●● John Russon focuses on aspects of our experience that are particularly
important for understanding the kinds of habits we must develop in order to
have a “healthy character.” Russon’s phenomenological investigation reveals
three essential virtues of agency: self-confidence, courage, and creativity. It
is these virtues of agency, Russon suggests, that “allow us to receive the call
of the good.”
●● Iain Thomson builds on the idea that Heidegger’s philosophy of education
is a philosophy profoundly concerned with “both personal and historical
transformation” by exploring the crucial moment in which these two
dimensions intersect and thus offers a phenomenology of virtue in the
context of education. In this moment, Thomson argues, personal and
historical transformation come together to illuminate, motivate, and
facilitate one another to help us become “open to the multiple suggestions
things offer us, to the point of dedicating ourselves—as teachers, as students,
and as human beings—to creatively bringing forth such hints responsively
and responsibly into the world.”
●● John Duncan explores a core idea of classical virtue ethics—the idea that
to live the best life requires understanding and living according to the
natural order of things—and then turns to the existential-phenomenological
tradition to investigate the orderlessness of the natural order of things.
Duncan thus argues that “virtue . . . requires living according to
fundamental orderlessness.” In exploring this realization, Duncan offers a
phenomenology of dissent into orderlessness.
●● Paul Gyllenhammer brings into dialogue phenomenology and virtue
ethics’ focus on flourishing as the basis of an excellent life. He shows us how
the natural attitude limits our well-being and then discusses dispositional
virtues of enthusiasm, sympathy, and tolerance which “are necessary
for being engaged in the world in a deeper way.” In this exploration of
flourishing and care for the self, Gyllenhammer then addresses the lived-
body, the wilderness, and socially responsible expertise—“three objects that
add depth to our lives.”

There is a rich diversity of topics in virtue ethics that can be pursued from
the perspective of phenomenology, such as: the need for proper character
6 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

dispositions (courage, humility, justice, etc.); the fundamental quest for

fulfillment (eudaimonia), which itself opens up a meditation on the bodily,
environmental, social, and intellectual excellences; the role of moral exemplars,
the dilemmas of ignorance and incontinence, and so on. Phenomenological
explorations and deep descriptions such as those offered in this volume begin
to explore the many ways in which the phenomenological and virtue ethics
traditions can complement and elucidate each other.
 Part I

Phenomenology and the Tradition

8
 1

Phainomenon and Logos in Aristotle’s Ethics

Lawrence J. Hatab

If we want to know how phenomenology can address virtue ethics, surely we

must begin with Aristotle as the first phenomenologist who thought about
virtue.1 How are we to understand him as a phenomenologist? Aristotle seems
unique in the Western tradition up until the nineteenth century: for Aristotle,
human beings belong in the natural world and are at home in it. There is no other
reality than the world we inhabit. Unlike Platonism, medieval philosophy, or
even modern philosophy, human existence is not subject to some fundamental
flaw (respectively: embodiment, the fall, or common sense) that philosophy
is called upon to repair. For Aristotle, the ordinary world of our experience is
fully prepared and meant to elicit philosophical understanding. Philosophy,
therefore, will begin with how the world already appears to us in various ways,
before we philosophize. Philosophy amounts to an explication, clarification, and
improvement of natural experience, especially through gathering patterns and
organizing concepts (see Physics, 184a16–21).
Aristotle’s phenomenology is therefore a philosophy that begins with natural
and cultural appearances, an orientation that can be understood in four main
ways:

1. Investigation should begin with observable phainomena, through which the

search for explanations can properly proceed (Parts of Animals, 640a15ff).
Phenomena are the “witnesses” and “paradigms” for philosophical inquiry
(Eudemian Ethics, 1216b26ff). Contrary to speculative metaphysics and
etiological stories, Aristotle insists that the “why” and the “what” of things
cannot be examined before the “that” (to hoti) of things; to reverse this order
“is to inquire into nothing” (Posterior Analytics, 93a15–28). Aristotle takes
his point of departure, not from theoretical constructions, but from what is
immediately apparent in perceptible encounters. These phenomena should
10 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

be understood essentially as perceptible wholes, in the way that things (like

trees) present themselves to us in ordinary experience—an orientation
that distinguishes Aristotle’s thinking from Platonic transcendence and the
elemental reductions of earlier natural philosophers and atomists.
2. Investigation will be guided by language. Aristotle often begins by
consulting what “is said” or what “we say,” by taking certain meanings
or usages as given.2 He then proceeds to think with and through these
linguistic inheritances toward clearer and deeper insights. In general terms,
Aristotle assumes an intrinsic correlation between language and being; the
elements of being cannot be understood apart from what is said of them
(Metaphysics, 992b19–22).3
3. Philosophy should consult both “the many” and “the wise,” that is, both
common beliefs and refined insights (Topics, 100b22ff). The implication
is that philosophical findings should be neither so unusual as to violate
familiar senses of things nor so familiar as to rest solely with ordinary
experience.
4. With respect to “the wise,” Aristotle begins most of his investigations
with a survey of historical precedents that have marked philosophical
understanding so far, with the aim of sorting out what in these sources is
appropriate or inappropriate to phenomena. Contrary to some readings of
Aristotle that take his surveys to be simply setups meant to valorize his own
thinking by contrast, Aristotle seems to genuinely believe that philosophy
should build from beliefs that have already found a place in human thinking
(see Metaphysics, 993a30ff). For Aristotle, it is hard for human thinking to
be entirely in error.4

Aristotle’s philosophy

As opposed to the transcendent tendencies in Platonism and the abstract

deductions typical of earlier philosophers, Aristotle was a thoroughgoing realist
and naturalist, and his thinking stressed particularity and plurality. Consider
Aristotle’s concept of ousia, the primary sense of being as the unified reference
for descriptions. Ousia, for Aristotle—unlike the Platonic conception of being
and the connotations of the Latinate “substance”—is primarily a “this something”
(tode ti), an imminent, concrete presence in experience (Categories, 3b10–12).
Species and genera are ousia in a secondary sense, in that they reveal something
about being, but not in a primary sense (2b29–31). Secondary ousia (e.g. the
 Phainomenon and Logos in Aristotle’s Ethics 11

universal “tree”) does not exist in its own right (hence Aristotle’s critique of
Platonic Forms). The primary sense of ousia suggests the radicality of the “that”
over the “what,” the sense of presence in temporal experience.
Aristotle’s ontology of nature is essentially about temporal finitude, motion,
and change. In the Physics, he investigates the explanations and ordering principles
of nature (phusis), which is directly identified with movement and change
(Physics, 200b12). Things of nature have an intrinsic principle of movement, as
distinct from things brought into being extrinsically by production (192b10ff).
Phusis, then, has to do with self-manifesting beings. The task of analysis is to
make sense out of change and movement, which Aristotle accomplishes by way
of the concepts of matter and form, which are given a dynamic quality in the
concepts of potentiality (dunamis) and actualization (energeia). It is important
to stress that both dunamis and energeia are active concepts, for Aristotle.
The two together represent a single model of process (201a10ff). Dunamis as
potentiality is not simply possibility, but an active power, a capacity to develop;
and energeia as actuality is not simply a finished state, but being at work (ergon)
in the actualizing of potential. Form (eidos), then, cannot be understood simply
as a static “shape,” but rather as the active self-organization of a developing being
(194b27). Notice that energeia and dunamis are coordinated with telos (end) in
Aristotle’s coinage of entelecheia (literally “having-an-end-in” one’s being), so
that the movements of phusis involve a being-toward, a self-emerging being on
the way toward a not-yet that can-be, which is to say, a coming to presence of an
absence (Physics, 191b13ff). In thinking ousia as a concrete occurrence in natural
experience, Aristotle is able to give movement, change, time, and negation their
appropriate senses of being.
In Aristotle’s text on the soul (psuchē, understood as life), we have a
phenomenology of an active, temporal movement animated by potentiality. The
soul is the form of the body’s matter, not as something separate from the body
but as the gathered actualization of potentials in a living being, an active capacity
to function and develop (De Anima, II.1). For Aristotle, the self is essentially an
activity, not a static entity. There is a unified coalescence of capacity, activation,
performance, and being in human nature in such a way that we are a living and
a doing (NE, 1167b31–1168a10).
Unlike the subject-object bifurcation in modern philosophy, Aristotle’s
reflections on the soul offer a bipolar conception of self and world. Though
sensation and its object are not the same being, they have one and the same
energeia (De Anima, 425b27–9, 426a16–18). In an analogous way, thought is
potentially the same as the things it thinks (429a13–17). Thinking is nothing
12 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

until it thinks something in the world and what it thinks must be in thought
(429b3–431a1). The actively thinking soul is the things it thinks (431b16–18).
In this account of activity, Aristotle alludes (417a15–18) to a discussion in the
Physics (III.1–3) where he claims that in activity the agent and patient are a single
process of actualization (illustrated by teaching and learning, building and a
house being built). The agent is not something self-contained in an interior zone,
“cut off ” (apotetmēmenē) from the object of its activity (202b2). The potential of
both is actualized in a single bipolar process. Not only does Aristotle accept the
existence of the external world without question (Physics, 193a2–3), his realism
goes so far as to claim that mind and world are a single joint activity, that the
mind is meant to know the world and the world is meant to be known by the
mind. We have here a single correlation rather than a relation between two
separate spheres. The very being of thought is essentially correlative with what it
thinks (Metaphysics, 1021a27ff).
The realism of Aristotle is not of a uniform kind. First, there is the plurality
of being: “being is spoken of in many ways” (Metaphysics, 1003a34). Whatever
unity there is in the notion of being will at best be analogical, since being cannot
provide a universal genus (1042a23). Different forms of being all “point” to
ousia, but not in a uniform way (1003a33–4). Aristotle also gives a pluralistic
account of truth in Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics. There he stipulates two
basic modes of the soul’s “having logos” (logon echon): (1) that involving beings
whose origins cannot be otherwise (necessary being), and (2) that involving
beings whose origins admit of being otherwise (contingent being), which calls
for bouleusis, or deliberation and decision (1139aff). The “virtue” of each mode
is its own proper function or work (ergon) in relation to the different spheres of
being. What follows is a discussion of five “intellectual virtues”: pertaining to
the first mode of logos are epistēmē (scientific knowledge), nous (intuitive grasp
of indemonstrable principles), and sophia (wisdom); pertaining to the second
mode are technē (skill in making) and phronēsis (practical wisdom or acting well
in human affairs). Aristotle then identifies these five virtues of thought with five
modes of truth, which are defined as the different functions and dispositions of
the different virtues; indeed, the virtues are five ways in which the soul is alētheuei
or “in the truth” (1139b12–18). Aristotle is here connecting truth with the very
being of the soul. Moreover, it is evident that truth is not limited to statements of
scientific exactitude; it also applies to inexact modes of discerning appropriate
action in spheres such as ethics. For Aristotle, there is truth in human living
(praxis) that is different from conclusive, demonstrative forms of truth.
 Phainomenon and Logos in Aristotle’s Ethics 13

Aristotle’s ethics is prepared in his analysis of the soul. As indicated earlier,

the human soul is not something separate from the body, but the active capacity
to lead a natural life. And the capacity (dunamis) that moves human life is desire
(On the Soul, 433b1), understood as a striving toward conditions in the world
affecting the actualization of potential. Desire (oreksis) cuts across all three parts
of the human soul: as appetite in the vegetative part, emotion in the sensitive part,
and wish in the rational part (On the Soul, III.10). Desire involves the experience
of an absence with respect to a desired condition (orekton), which opens up
the structure of striving toward a desired end (telos), as well as the need for
deliberation and choice regarding different ways of actualizing potential ends.
Deliberation about desire has an essentially temporal structure in considering
future possibilities in terms of present aims in the light of past experiences
(433b5–10). This brings us to the sphere of ethics.

Aristotle’s ethics

For Aristotle, ethics, like any other area of inquiry, must begin with phainomena
before relevant questions are sorted out (NE, 1145b2–8). In the following passage,
notice how a phenomenology of ethics includes the main elements sketched
earlier in this investigation (the “that,” language, the many, and the wise):

One ought not to demand an explanation [aitian] in all things alike, either, but
it is sufficient in some cases for it to be shown beautifully that something is so
[to hoti], in particular such things as concern starting-points [archē]: the “that”
comes first and is a starting-point. And of starting-points, some are beheld by way
of examples [epagoge], others by perception, others by becoming experienced
in some habit, and others in other ways. So one must try to go after each of
them by the means that belong to its nature [pephukasin], and be serious about
distinguishing them rightly, since this has great weight in what follows. For the
starting-point seems to be more than half of the whole, and many of the things that
are inquired after become illuminated along with it. And in connection with the
starting-point, one must examine it not only from its conclusion and supporting
premises, but also from the things that are said about it [legomenōn].
. . . Some of these things are said by many people and from ancient times,
others by a few well-reputed men, and it is reasonable that neither of these groups
would be wholly mistaken, and that they be right in some one point or at least or
even in most of them (1098b1–30).5
14 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

An additional element in Aristotle’s phenomenology of moral life is that we must

already be ethical to a certain degree before we think about ethics. Here the
importance of upbringing and the inheritance of ethical shaping are essential
to ethics (1103b22–5). Moreover, the extent to which normative factors are
already operating in human life is indicated in the first line of the Nicomachean
Ethics:

Every art and every inquiry, and likewise every action and choice, seems to aim at
some good, and hence it has been beautifully said that the good is that at which all
things aim (1094a1–3).

The ubiquity of the good means that Aristotle does not pursue metaethical
questions such as moral skepticism or the is-ought divide, because human
life is value-laden all the way down.6 So the question is not whether ethics
can be justified, or whether one should be ethical, but rather how one
should be ethical.7 A good deal of Aristotle’s ethics is simply stipulated (e.g.,
the nature of virtue), or taken as given, or accepted from precedents—a
phenomenology that can surely frustrate the justification agenda marking
so much of Western philosophy. Thinking about ethics, for Aristotle, begins
with the recognition that the word “good” indicates a desired end (1094a1–5).
And like being, goodness takes a plurality of forms (1096a24–5), and the
different goods are not ultimately commensurable.8 Living well amounts to
an organization of different desires in various practical milieus, in such a way
as to allow the development of human potential. The unifying term for the
good life, for Aristotle, is eudaimonia, which is the ultimate end for the sake
of which all actions are done (1097b1). The usual translation of “happiness”
does not sufficiently capture Aristotle’s meaning, which is better rendered
as human flourishing—living well (euzēn), acting well (eu prattein)—the
active realization of human potentials and the attainment of various natural
goods (1098b13–22). Aristotle maintains that his focus on eudaimonia is well
attested to because it accords with both long-standing opinion and the claims
of philosophers (1098b15–19).
Beginning with the phenomenology of desire, ethics is the consideration
of various orderings and judgments concerning better and worse choices—
because some desires are necessary (needs) and some are contingent (wants),
because some desires come in conflict with each other (NE, 1154b20–9), and
because experience teaches a distinction between real and apparent goods.
Eudaimonia will require the exercise of virtue (aretē), which is better rendered
as human excellence, or a mode of high-level functioning. The moral virtues
 Phainomenon and Logos in Aristotle’s Ethics 15

are those character traits, habits, and dispositions that disclose appropriate
choices and judgments regarding the ordering of desires, all for the sake of
living well.
Aristotle’s phenomenological ethics is deliberately counterposed to Platonic
tendencies toward a rationalistic, universalistic, perfectionist ethics.9 Reflection
on the good cannot bracket tradition and received opinions, but must begin
with cultural appearances, which can then be submitted to analysis, clarification,
and puzzle resolution (NE, 1095b3, 1145b3–7). The good must also be a human
good, reflecting the finite condition of a desiring being experiencing lacks and
limits, and so ethics should not be measured by divine perfection (1096b30–5,
1178a5–15). The good is also particular, not universal (1109b22–3), relative,
not absolute (1106b2), contingent, not necessary (1139b7–10), practical, not
theoretical (1103b28–30), temporal, not eternal (1096b4), immanent, not
transcendent (1196b30–5), and inexact, not precise (1094b20–5).
The good has a decidedly performative meaning for Aristotle, since it is
identified with activity and ergon, which means function, task, or work (NE,
1097b24ff). Eudaimonia is called the activity (energeia) of the soul in accordance
with virtue or moral excellence (1098a15–17). We should think of virtue here
in the sense of “virtuosity,” as excellence of performance, as effective, successful
action in social life. In fact, Aristotle connects aretē in ethics with the excellence
of a musician, who develops musical skill only by practicing (NE, II.1). Here,
Aristotle clarifies that virtues do not arise naturally in people; they require
development through practice. But people do have a natural capacity (dunamis)
to develop virtue, which becomes actualized after practicing settles into a
habitual disposition (hexis), which could be called “second nature” (1103a31ff).
In line with this, Aristotle identifies ethics as essentially a practical endeavor,
where the goal is not knowledge, but becoming good (1103b26–9). In fact, he
chastises people who think moral philosophy is satisfied by mere argument or
talk, comparing them to patients who simply listen to a physician without doing
what is prescribed (1105b12–19).
Eudaimonia is also analyzed in terms of a specific temporal structure of
activity, as a process of coming into being and thus not as the constancy of a
“possession” (NE, 1169b29–32). Eudaimonia is finally understood in terms of
the comprehensiveness of the virtues and the course of a complete life (1098a18–
21)—in other words, as the overall temporal structure of a life fulfilling potential,
and not simply a focus on particular events or experiences. This is why the familiar
association of “happiness” with “good feeling” is so misleading; eudaimonia is a
comprehensive and ongoing achievement, not a “state of mind.” As Aristotle says
16 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

in another text, the very end (telos) of eudaimonia is not a certain “kind of being”
(poiotēs), but a life of activity (Poetics, 1450a16–18). In the end, eudaimonia is
measured by the fulfillment and achievement of various goods that are naturally
beneficial for human beings: goods of the environment, the body, and the soul
(NE, 1098b13ff).

Virtue

The virtues are the capacities, dispositions, and habits that enable a person to
orchestrate all the various possible goods, measured by the successful performance
of a well-rounded life. In this regard, Aristotle insists on the importance of
good upbringing prior to mature reflection on the good life. He seems quite
pessimistic about the prospects for ethical virtue without the cultivation of good
habits and dispositions from early on in life (NE, 1095b4ff, 1103b21–5). He
connects character (ēthos) with habit (ethos) and says that virtues arise mostly
through teaching and learning, and they require time and the accumulation of
experience to develop (1103a14ff). This is why Aristotle points to the limits of
rational argument in ethics (1179b1ff). There is just so much you can say to a
person inclined to vice, and people open up to ethical matters in ways other than
strict analysis of beliefs and their rational justification (1179a34–1180a33).
For Aristotle, each virtue involves (1) a certain situation or context of
action, (2) a certain affect, attitude, or capacity for action with respect to that
situation, (3) vices of excess and defect with respect to the affect, attitude, or
capacity, and (4) the virtue of the appropriate mean between the two vices.
So virtues are defined as the capacity to discover a mean (mesotēs) between
extreme conditions of excess and defect, of too much and too little (NE,
1104a25ff). For instance, the virtue of moderation in pleasure-seeking is a
mean between overindulgence and ascetic denial or insensitivity. Acting well
according to virtue, however, is a performance that does not operate on the
basis of theoretical formulas or rules to guide action. Virtuous activity is inexact
and can only be executed by a competent person in the context of a particular
kairos, a particular situation at a particular time (1104a5ff)—indeed, the telos
of an action is specifically identified with a kairos (1110a12–13).
We might better understand Aristotle’s sense of virtue by substituting an
oscillating balancing act for the notion of a mean, because a mean suggests
some “middle point” between two poles that distorts the sense of virtuous
 Phainomenon and Logos in Aristotle’s Ethics 17

action displayed in Aristotle’s texts. The ethical mean, for Aristotle, is not like a
numerical or spatial mean, which would be uniform for all cases (NE, 1106a27ff);
it is more like a process of tightening and loosening a tension (1138b23). As
indicated above, virtuous action varies according to the context, the specific
individual, and the particular situation. Sometimes the mean will be closer to
one of the extremes than to the other (Eudemian Ethics, 1222a22ff); for instance,
some situations might demand more or less generosity; sometimes, degrees
of deficiency or excess can be praiseworthy (NE, 1109b16ff), as in the case of
certain strong passions that might be useful in leadership. A general account
of the mean is difficult to articulate, since it is relative to particular cases and
perceptions (1126b3–4).
Even if we consider specific discoveries of the mean by particular individuals,
what would tell them that they had found some “middle point?” If there is no
general formula for finding the mean, why formalize the matter at all by suggesting
some measure borrowed from mathematics? Instead, we can call virtue a balancing
act in the midst of counterforces, in the manner of an oscillating attunement. This
would be consistent with Aristotle’s remarks about finding the mean by tending
toward the extremes (NE, 1109b2ff). The measure of virtuous action would not
be some generalizable or even particularizable locus of precision, but more a
mode of discovery that unfolds as an experiment in learning how to live well,
an experiment that proceeds by experiencing conflicting forces and possibilities,
and then discovering balances that foster successful living. As Aristotle says,
individuals have different natural tendencies and aims, and they come to learn
what works well by tending in conflicting directions and gauging the appropriate
path (1109b2–28). We might say that the Aristotelian “doctrine” of the mean
does not so much define or locate a proper action, as much as set the negative
boundaries for what is out of line (the vices), and open space for individual
discovery somewhere between these boundaries.10 Virtue as a balancing act within
these boundaries is a general guideline that can only be actualized in concrete
cases and in different ways. The specificity of virtuous action entails that there is
no external or formulaic support for ethical action, which is thus “ungrounded” in
the sense of being revealed only in the immediate present. The general character
of virtue (“Find the appropriate balance between extremes”) does not justify or
explain virtuous action (what the appropriate balance is in a certain situation);
rather, the definition of virtue simply points to the task of its discovery. This would
fit Aristotle’s account of his ethics as a rough outline (tupō) of the parameters of
virtue rather than an exact description of virtuous acts (1103b35ff).
18 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

The logos of virtuous living

A central term in Aristotle’s ethics is logos, usually translated as “reason.” But

it must be stressed that the “rationality” of ethics in Aristotle should not be
understood in terms of modern models of reason that are based on abstract
principles and the reflective posture of the thinking subject detached from action
in the world. The soul’s bipolar relation with the world suggests that living well
is environmentally responsive—that is, the movements of the soul are likewise
the opening up of the world—as opposed to the modern theoretical model of
constructing moral principles and applying them to experience as rules for
action. We noted that a virtue becomes a hexis, a settled, habitual disposition
to act and function well (NE, 1106a12ff). The word hexis is related to echein,
having, and in another text Aristotle defines hexis as both activity (energeia) and
having, and in both cases he assigns a bipolar structure between having and the
thing had, also between making and the thing made (Metaphysics, V.20)—which
recalls the bipolar structure of activity and knowing discussed earlier. In another
chapter, hexis is even something that can “possess” the haver, as when a fever
“possesses” a person (V.23). All this suggests that virtue is not simply an agent-
centered phenomenon, but an environmentally responsive power that “blends,”
as it were, the agent with its world—where virtuous action and its situation in
the world are co-disclosed.
The structure of desire indicates complex intersections of self and world that
call for appropriate ordering in practice, rather than some kind of theoretical
governance. This is why ethical thinking, for Aristotle, has neither the precision
nor the operative procedures of modern conceptions of reason. The Greek word
logos has a rich array of meanings, and there are occasions where Aristotle
clearly takes logos to mean a kind of proportional ordering and attunement (NE,
1119b16).11 Let us explore this idea in more detail.
The practical virtue of phronēsis (sometimes translated as “practical wisdom”)
is central to Aristotle’s ethics. Since phronēsis does not exhibit demonstrative
certainty, it is better to see its “rationality” as an emergent ordering and
balancing of desires in the midst of contingent practical environments. Aristotle
characterizes phronēsis as the ability to discover the mean (NE, 1107a1–2).
Rather than some kind of rationalized subjective agency, phronēsis is “being in
the truth” (1140b5), in the sense of disclosing an appropriate path in pursuit
of an aim in the midst of conflicting forces. Phronēsis and the mean are also
identified with orthos logos (1103b32–4, 1138b20–5, 1144b25–30), which is
 Phainomenon and Logos in Aristotle’s Ethics 19

often translated as “correct reason.” But orthos logos is connected with aiming
at a target and with a tightening and relaxing that suggests either a bow string
or tuning a lyre string (1138b21–5); at another point (1109b24–7), Aristotle
says that finding the mean is facilitated by tending toward the excess and defect,
again suggesting a “tuning.”
I want to argue that Aristotle’s usage of orthos logos does not readily fit what
we would expect “correct reason” to mean, that is, an explanation or justification
that can satisfy intersubjective criteria for a logical argument. Aristotle’s
phenomenology of virtue seems to offer something different from modern
conceptions of rationality. At one point (NE, II.2) orthos logos is correlated with
action (praxis) as opposed to knowledge—and right here Aristotle talks about
the “inexact” nature of this inquiry, that only virtuous agents themselves can
discover in each specific case (kairos) what is orthos. It is not clear how such
specificity could satisfy familiar criteria for rational adjudication. We have noted
that Aristotle sometimes employs logos as a kind of proportional ordering.
He also connects logos with the essential being (ousia), function (ergon), and
active capacity (dunamis) of a living being as a whole (On the Soul, 412b10–
413a10); indeed, “actuality (entelecheia) is the logos of potential being” (415b15).
These usages all suggest something substantive rather than discursive. In the
same text (425b26ff), when discussing sensation and its object having one
and the same actualization, he describes proper sensation as the logos between
extreme conditions that destroy the sense (426a27ff), for instance, an excess of
brightness or darkness with respect to vision. Here logos has nothing to do with
“reasoning,” but rather the nature and bipolar structure of disclosure. Likewise,
the ethical mean could be called the virtuous disclosure of proper action (and
like the sensation case, it can involve the bipolar actualization of virtuous action
together with its situation in the world).
The point is that logos here would not mean a “rational account” but the very
character and nature of an immediate virtuous act. Aristotle does use the word
logos at times pertaining to an articulate account and reasoning, but at other
times, logos pertains to the very form or essence of something.12 Accordingly,
orthos logos need not be understood as a rational account or guide for action,
but as the very form of an achievement.13 If we consider the examples of archery
or music that Aristotle uses to illustrate orthos logos, we can see the futility of
certain “rational” questions in this context: How did you (know how to) hit the
bull’s-eye? How did you know that the instrument was tuned properly? The best
one can say is: “I just did.” Virtuous action, for Aristotle, seems to be a similar
20 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

case. As we will see, this is not to exclude logos-as-articulation from ethics. But
it seems that orthos logos can be more like skillful action and direct engagement
than an explanation or rational account.14
Relevant to this discussion are the several times Aristotle calls virtuous
discernment a mode of perception (aisthēsis).15 Indeed, in one passage (NE,
1143a35ff), Aristotle identifies this kind of ethical perception with nous, in the
sense of an immediate insight not derived from reasoning (logos). Moreover, the
phenomenological character of this kind of insight is shown in the following
passages:

The person of serious moral stature discerns each thing correctly [orthos], and in
each kind the truth shows itself to this person [talēthes autō phainetai] . . . [who]
is distinguished most of all perhaps for seeing [horan] what is true in each kind,
since such a person is as it were a rule and measure for what is noble and pleasant.
(1113a30–5)
What appears [to phainomenon] to the person of serious moral stature truly is
the thing . . . . And what appear to be pleasures to this person truly are pleasures.
(1176a17ff)

It seems that a virtuous person directly “perceives” the right path, which is
different from a reasoned inference. Phronēsis is specifically identified with
perception because unlike scientific knowledge (epistēmē), phronēsis apprehends
“ultimate particulars” in direct experience (1142a24ff), ultimate (eschaton) in that
like intuitive insight in nous, such perception requires no further justification. In
general terms, virtuous perception attends to the specific features of a concrete
situation that figure in ethical discernment (as opposed to generalizations).
With respect to orthos logos, we should also consider the range of meanings
in the word orthos.16 It can indeed mean “correct,” but also straight, upright, safe,
happy, and prosperous. The word also associates with seeing straight, hearing
attentively, restoring to health and happiness, guiding rightly, honoring, and
exalting. The word is derived from orthoō, meaning to set up straight or stand
up from a reclined or fallen posture. Orthos can also mean real, genuine, or
steadfast. If we think of steadfast as a capacity to stand against falling back, we
can think of orthos marking a steady capacity for proper action. We can see here
the many shades of orthos connecting with Aristotle’s sense of virtuous action,
in ways that are different from the meaning of “correct.” And orthos, as “straight”
versus “crooked,” can have the sense of “direct” versus “roundabout” or “missed,”
which certainly captures Aristotle’s metaphor of hitting a target—which is a
direct achievement rather than a cognitive claim.
 Phainomenon and Logos in Aristotle’s Ethics 21

Orthos can also connote succeeding at an aim, especially in the word

katorthōsis, variants of which Aristotle uses several times pertaining to virtuous
action (NE, 1106b26 and 31, 1107a15, 1142b30). Consequently, orthos logos
can refer to successful action in a practical environment, accomplished by an
attunement of the soul with its environment, something very different from
“correct reason.” Phronēsis, then, is much more suggestive of an active self-world
attunement than something like rational agency. Phronēsis could be called a
capacity for practical discernment, or an ethical finesse, a cultivated aptitude
to uncover the appropriate balancing and ordering of practical possibilities.
Aristotle specifically says that phronēsis is not mere knowledge—it must include
action (1152a8–9). Moreover, as a developed disposition and “having” (hexis), it
is registered in a person’s very being, and so it cannot be “forgotten,” as can factual
knowledge (1140b28–30). And with respect to phronēsis as a hexis, we should
note that Aristotle describes it as a disposition to act not simply “according to
(kata) orthos logos”—which carries a more inferential meaning—but “in the
midst of/along with (meta) orthos logos” (1144b26ff)—which suggests a more
constitutive meaning.

Measuring virtue

Discovering the mean is relative to a particular person’s situation (NE, 1106b1),

which makes virtuous action difficult, because it is context-dependent. Formal
compliance with a rule is easy; judging the proper balance and appropriate action
in a certain situation, in a certain way, at a certain time, to a certain degree, for
a certain purpose, is hard (1109a24ff). For example, generosity could vary in its
suitability or vary in degrees according to the circumstances, persons, resources,
prospects, and so on. What is appropriate can only be rendered at the time and
in the situation of a particular agent, and it demands an experience of particulars,
which is neither exact nor universal (1109b22ff). Consequently, Aristotle’s ethics
does not involve moral axioms or formulas that can transcend and govern the
specificity of experience. To be sure, ethics can involve certain generalizations
presented in an unqualified (haplōs) form (e.g., “It is good to be generous”),
but ethical practice will always have to confront qualifications in experience
(1134a25ff).17
Aristotle appears to be advocating a kind of decisionism or intuitionism
in ethics, because the measure of virtuous action is the virtuous person (NE,
22 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

1113a25ff); the measure of the good is that which appears to the good person
(1176a17ff). An ethical decision cannot be arbitrary, however, since it must
be responsive to the environment at hand and shaped by past experience. But
as contextual, a decision is saturated with contingency (1112b8ff)—which is
exactly why ethical actions involve choice rather than necessary outcomes. To
be educated in ethics is not to have decisive knowledge; indeed, the mark of
an educated person is seeking only the degree of precision that the nature of
an endeavor will allow (1094b23–5). As we have noted, the discipline of ethics
cannot issue exact rules and measures; it can only be sketched in broad outline
with an eye toward enactment by virtuous persons in concrete circumstances.
Truth in ethics can only be judged by way of performances in life (ta erga kai
ton bion); otherwise, it is mere words (1179a18–23). Aristotle is certainly not
an ethical relativist or subjectivist. The proper action is “objective” in the sense
of being duly responsive to the environment at hand, such that anyone in this
situation would do the same thing. So there is a kind of “correctness” in virtuous
action, but its immediacy does not issue an “objective standard” that anyone
outside this situation would likewise grasp.
In Aristotle, a virtue becomes a mode of the soul’s being, a hexis, or
“having”(NE, 1106a13), a capacity to make appropriate choices that with
practice becomes habit, or second nature (see 1152a31–4). An ethical habit, for
Aristotle, is not some mechanical operation or instinctive drive, but an acquired
capacity to act well that eventually can become relatively unforced and natural.
As a settled way of being, we could call habit a mode of in-habiting an ethical
environment. Aristotle seems to be saying that a truly virtuous person will act
well without much analysis or difficulty.
It is important to note that genuine virtue, for Aristotle, is rare (NE, 1109a29).
A summary of Aristotle’s conception of true virtue can be gleaned from his
discussion of akrasia, or weakness of will (NE, VII.1–10). Aristotle distinguishes
persons as being virtuous, morally strong, morally weak, and vicious. A virtuous
person does the good habitually, even with pleasure (1099a6ff). A morally
strong person knows what is good but struggles to do it. A morally weak person
knows what is good but fails to do it. A vicious person acts badly without regret.
We would tend to call the morally strong person virtuous in many respects, but
Aristotle would not. Aristotle’s ideal, though difficult to achieve, seems to be
a person who moves through life with ethical composure and facility, whose
desires have become properly attuned, and who possesses all the virtues as a
unified whole (1145a1–2). Aristotle claims that most people fall in between
the morally weak and morally strong (1150a9–16, 1152a25–7). Morally weak
 Phainomenon and Logos in Aristotle’s Ethics 23

people merely speak the right words (logous), like actors reciting their lines. A
truly virtuous person is “co-natural” (sumphuēnai) with the proper path, where
belief, desire, and proper action are coordinated together (1139b4–5, 1147a18ff).
Here phronēsis, good character, and acting well are all fused in a single package
(1144a, 1144b30–2).

Logos, deliberation, and action

Now I must confront the question of how my account can accord with elements
of Aristotle’s ethics that seem to reflect reasoning procedures and logical
inferences: the so-called practical syllogism and the role of deliberation in
virtuous living.
The practical syllogism seems to explain virtuous action as a result of logical
inferences, with premise-conclusion structures patterned after theoretical
syllogisms. When Aristotle gives examples of practical syllogisms, they
usually pertain to action scenarios that are not exactly ethical in nature (e.g.,
navigation), but I will focus on one segment of the Nicomachean Ethics that
is pertinent to ethics and illustrative of the complex questions at hand: NE,
1147a24ff, which is part of the analysis of akrasia. This segment immediately
follows the claim about the “co-natural” character of the truly virtuous person
cited above. Aristotle then moves to investigate akrasia “in terms of nature”
(phusikōs), that is, not according to logical argument but in terms of human
nature. This is where an example of a practical syllogism about eating sweet
things is introduced: If one ought to taste sweet things, and this thing here is
sweet, then one must immediately taste it.18 It would seem that the conclusion
would more likely be “then one ought to taste this,” which would be followed
by the action. But it looks like the conclusion is the action, which is confirmed
in another text, On the Movement of Animals, 7: the conclusion of a practical
syllogism “becomes the action” (ginetai hē praxis), something done euthus,
immediately (701a13–15), as in the case of “Every man ought to walk; one
is a man; immediately one walks.” Returning to the tasting syllogism (NE,
1147a25–31), the major premise is a general belief about a good, the minor
premise involves a perception of a particular, and then, just as in a theoretical
syllogism, where the soul must affirm the conclusion, here the soul is compelled
(anankē) to do the conclusion immediately (prattein euthus). Again, there is
something logically peculiar about the practical syllogism; the conclusion
seems to be not “cognition,” but an action.
24 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

In any case, Aristotle then depicts the logical structure of akrasia (NE,
1147a32ff), where the major premise concerns not consuming sweets (as in
a diet, perhaps), and the conclusion is not to taste the sweet thing—but with
akrasia, desire overrides the conclusion. Aristotle says that from the standpoint
of physiology (phusiologōn), the akratic person is like someone drunk or asleep,
whose desire runs contrary to orthos logos, and who thereby is precluded from
“proper knowledge.” In context, it seems that the akratic person is constitutionally
contrasted with the “co-natural” condition of the truly virtuous person noted in
this segment of the text. I want to suggest that here the practical syllogism is
more like a logical reconstruction of an ethical scenario, rather than a “causal”
account of ethical action, and I say this for two reasons: (1) the conclusion
seems to be the action rather than the cause of the action; and (2) the “natural”
factors in the analysis seem to stress the very being of the agents rather than
their reasoning.
The reconstructive character of the practical syllogism can be gleaned
from the Movement of Animals passage cited above. Here the premises involve
a posited good and a current capacity (dunatou) to act on it (701a25). Then
Aristotle says that with obvious premises (“one is a man”), “thinking (dianoia)
does not stop and consider” them (701a26–7). But then Aristotle speaks even
more generally about immediate actions done without analysis upon the
apprehension of some good:

What we do without reflection we do quickly. For with the activation [energēsē] of

a perception or an imagination or a thinking of the for-the-sake-of-which, what is
desired is done immediately. For the energeia of desire is a substitute for inquiry
or thinking. (701a27–33)

The point is that ethical action need not stem from rational inferences—indeed
it can be a “substitute” for reasoning—and so the practical syllogism can be read
as a reconstruction of an action rather than a determination of it (who ever
moves to walk by inferential steps?). This would accord with a passage from the
Nicomachean Ethics that distinguishes between an action following examination
and an immediate action in sudden situations that stems not from examination
but a settled hexis (1117a18ff). Generally, I want to say that at least with regard to
a fully virtuous person in unexceptional circumstances, a logos of ethical action
need not mean rational justification, but rather an articulation that helps us
make sense of an action that is not schematized in advance.19
Next we should consider the role of deliberation (bouleusis) in Aristotle’s
ethics (NE, III.3). Deliberation leads to proairesis, which can be called decision
 Phainomenon and Logos in Aristotle’s Ethics 25

or resolve (1113a9ff).20 The question is whether deliberation fits typical models

of rational analysis that justify or explain ethical decisions. I want to argue that
ethics, for Aristotle, certainly includes examination and articulation, and that
decisions can indeed follow upon such discursive practices—but that such
practices are not a necessary condition for ethical action (especially with full
virtue) and that even when such practices are in play, they will not likely satisfy
familiar expectations for rational justification.
Deliberation, for Aristotle, is not about a good end (telos), but about the means
toward that end (NE, 1112b13ff, 1113b3ff)—so a physician does not deliberate
about whether to heal a patient, but how to heal a particular patient. The ethical
telos seems already in place by way of boulēsis, a wish or aim (1116b27–8). In
deliberation, one “assumes” the end (1112b16). The nondeliberative is associated
with the “immediacy” of the good person’s ingrained comprehension of what is
worthy in life, which pertains not to ratiocination, but a person’s very being, as
indicated in the following account of a practical syllogism (1144a31–7), where
the telos is the major premise:

For deductive reasoning about things done [sullogismoi tōn praktōn] has as a
starting-point (archēn, i.e., the major premise): “Since such-and-such is an end
[telos] and the best [ariston],” . . . and this does not show itself [phainetai] except
to a good person; for vice warps a person and produces error about the sources
[archas] that govern action. So it is clear [phaneron] that it is impossible [adunaton]
to have practical judgment [phronimon] without being good.

Moreover, there is no deliberation about direct perceptions (NE, 1113a1–2),

which presumably play a basic role in ethical action. Deliberation concerns
contingencies pertaining to actions that aim toward an assumed good
(1141b10ff), especially when the right means is uncertain or indeterminate
(1112b8ff). Upon deliberation, ethical decision or resolve is a function of desire,
or desire fused with thought (1113a10, 1139b4–5); thus resolve is different from
mere cogitation, and even from true belief (1112a5). Resolve is identified with
virtue, which is called hexis proairetikē, a settled disposition of resolve toward
the mean (1106b36). Ethical decisions are measured as good or bad, not true or
false as in the case of belief; and decisions mark who we are as constitutive of our
character, which is not the case with mere cognition (1111b31ff).
Deliberation is associated in certain ways with orthos logos. In NE, VI.9,
deliberating well (euboulia) is “a kind of ” orthotēs, but not the kind in epistēmē
or true belief. Yet deliberation is a logos, a thinking things through (dianoias),
which is not an assertion but an investigating (zētei) and reckoning (logizetai). The
26 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

orthotēs in deliberation concerns what is advantageous or fitting (sumpheron) for

a particular telos; and phronēsis is the “true comprehension” (alēthēs hupolēpsis)
of what is advantageous or fitting. That orthotēs here might involve what I
earlier called a “successful completion of an aim” can be gleaned from another
discussion, where Aristotle examines the main objects of pursuit (aireseis): the
noble, the advantageous, and the pleasant (1104b30ff). The good person “goes
right” with these pursuits, while the bad person “goes wrong.” The two terms
here are katorthōtikos and hamartētikos, with the former having a meaning
of setting straight or successful accomplishment, and the latter a meaning of
missing the mark or failure. The point is that deliberation and resolve are not of
an entirely different order from features of orthos logos discussed earlier in this
chapter—that is to say, something more achievement-based then discursive.21
Nevertheless, it is important not to exclude discursive practices, articulation,
and reasoning from Aristotle’s ethics. But even so, such elements cannot fully
determine—and cannot be separated from—the more nonrational features of
virtuous discernment we have examined.22 Surely examination and deliberation
are part of ethical life, although I would surmise that they more likely function
in the spheres of morally weak and morally strong persons, since genuine virtue
seems to be “second nature” to the truly good person. In any case, one can articulate
ethical actions in various ways and even supply a set of reasons. Yet the sheer
specificity of virtuous discernment suggests limitations on rational discourse:

Why did you give him the money?

Because it was the generous thing to do.
How did you know it was the generous thing to do?
Because it was a mean between stinginess and extravagance.
How did you know it was a mean?
Because he needs the money and will not squander it.
How do you know that?
Because I know him.
How do you know him? . . .

It seems that the articulation of virtuous action zeroes in on an immediate and

unique discernment, in the face of which articulation runs out. So virtuous
action can involve reasoning, but it need not proceed from reasoning, and even
with reasoning, there is a limit to what can be communicated for explanatory
purposes. The word logos can apply to the full range of elements here because
it can refer both to articulation and to the substantive form of a virtuous act.
Within Aristotle’s ethical naturalism, there is a sense in which human actions are
 Phainomenon and Logos in Aristotle’s Ethics 27

value-laden; such meanings can be articulated but they need not be. Reasoned
articulation can prepare and make possible the co-natural inhabitation of
full virtue that can develop over time—and then function without reasoned
articulation. The double-sense of logos thus helps us ascertain the complicated
interplay of articulation and direct action in Aristotle’s ethics. One could say that
the intellectual virtue of phronēsis, the metavirtue of ethical virtues, is itself a
balancing act between extremes, between sheer cognition and sheer perception,
between sheer reflection and sheer action. Such is Aristotle’s rich account of how
ethical discernment shows itself in human life.

Notes

1 Portions of this chapter are drawn from my book, Ethics and Finitude: Heideggerian
Contributions to Moral Philosophy (Hatab 2000). Extended passages from
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (hereafter NE) are taken from the following
translation (occasionally modified):
Aristotle. 2002. Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Joe Sachs. Newburyport, MA: Focus
Publishing.
2 For example, NE 1094a3, 1095a16. See also Categories 2b31, Physics 191b2ff,
Metaphysics 1003a34ff.
3 Consider how the basic concept of being is deployed as both the bearer of
properties and the subject of predication (Categories 1–5). For a focused treatment
of the scholarship on the language-being correlation, see Long 2011, 49–56.
4 See Long 2011, 56–71.
5 The word archē in this passage is often translated as “principle” or “first principle.”
But that suggests a governing conception that does not always fit Aristotle’s
phenomenology. Archē also means “beginning” or “origin.” I think “starting-point”
fits the context of Aristotle’s ethics because he is clearly not using archē as some
kind of rational principle, but rather as the ways in which we already have senses of
the ethical: “For the archē is that something is so (to hoti), and if this is sufficiently
apparent (phainoito), there is no additional need for the reason why” (1095b7–8).
6 Indeed, the very nature of language, for Aristotle, seems to be originally the
making manifest (dēloun) of normative concerns (Politics 1253a10ff).
7 See Burnyeat 1980, 69–92.
8 NE 1164b2–6, 1096a30ff; Eudemian Ethics 1243b22; Politics 1283a3–10.
9 For a rich and extensive study of the differences between Aristotle and Plato on
the good life, see Martha Nussbaum (1986).
10 One of the meanings of mesos is “between,” and on occasion Aristotle will use a
more specific meaning of “between” (metaxu) in relation to virtue (e.g., 1138b23).
28 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

11 For details on the complex and varied meanings of logos in ancient Greek, see
Guthrie 1962, 420–4.
12 See, for example, the former usage in Metaphysics 1029b20–2, and the latter usage
in 1035b26–31.
13 See Glidden (1992). Glidden says that Aristotle’s call for orthos logos is like a
baseball manager telling a pitcher to “throw strikes,” which is an ideal that cannot
be a “rule” independent of achievement.
14 At one point, Aristotle indicates that the orthos logos of virtue is a mean between
extremes marked by a certain horos (1138b18–34). The word horos is usually
translated as “standard” or “criterion,” but it also means “limit” or “boundary”
(sometimes between two places). If horos is a “standard,” we run into the problem
of Aristotle not seeming to provide one. On this, see Peterson (1988). But it may be
that there is no communicable “standard,” only the shaping of a “limit,” of a “place”
between extremes in a particular case that only a virtuous person can gauge.
15 See NE 1109b18–24, 1113a1, 1126b2–4, and 1147a26.
16 Aristotle himself says that orthotēs has more than one meaning (1142b18).
17 The word haplōs also carries the meaning of “simple,” which is connected
with archē in Metaphysics 1059b35. As noted earlier, archē can be translated as
“starting-point,” which fits a good deal of Aristotle’s ethics. Once we have been
schooled in the meaning and importance of the virtues, our minds can have in
place simple, unqualified guidelines—such as “Be generous”—that “start” our
ethical sense; but these up-front conceptions are not governing “principles” that
determine when, whether, or how to be generous.
18 For a thorough examination of this text, see Bogen and Moravcsik (1982).
19 See McDowell 1999, especially 134–7 and note 22. With the Greek word logos, its
most basic meaning can be called an articulation that makes sense to an audience.
See Ferrari (1997).
20 See Heidegger 2009, 97.
21 For an analysis of nondiscursive elements in Aristotle’s approach to ethical
practice, see Wiggins (1981).
22 It is crucial not to construe “nonrational” elements in Aristotle as “noncognitive.”
Aristotle does not separate cognition from perception or even from emotion.
Perception and emotion are not “thoughtless,” because they can in their way deliver
knowledge. For an insightful analysis of the nonrational features of virtue that are
yet not outside cognition, see Moss (2011). Moss takes on “intellectualist” readings
of Aristotle that surmise a rational determination of moral ends in phronēsis, in
order to hold off a purported Hume-style demotion of reason in ethics. She ably
shows how Aristotle’s texts do not support such readings. Phronēsis, she argues,
is the discernment of how to fulfill virtuous aims that are already inculcated in
the soul through habituation (emphasizing the key text of NE 1144a6–9). For an
account of how emotions figure in ethical discernment, see Kosman (1980).
 2

“Disimpropriation” and Infused Virtue: The

Question of (Christian) Virtue Ethics in the
Phenomenology of Michel Henry
Michelle Rebidoux

Interest in the phenomenological work of French thinker Michel Henry

(1922–2002) has been rapidly growing in English over the past decade or
so, with a focus on Henry’s (re)articulation of fundamental ontology as
preecstatic affectivity and his accompanying critique of the modern culture of
representation as a form of barbarism. Of the array of his writings—dealing
with topics as various as phenomenology, Marx and Marxism, psychoanalysis,
art, and Christianity (all of which branch out from his core phenomenological
insight of “clandestine ipseic life”)—there is, however, not a single work
that one could point to which might immediately be called a work of ethics
proper, so completely subsumed are his (very sparse) ethical writings into his
articulation of fundamental ontology. Even his 1987 work of cultural criticism,
La Barbarie—despite, or perhaps because of, its polemical moralistic tones—is
more a critique of the cultural repercussions of what he sees as a misguided
approach to ontology than it is an articulation of a comprehensive ethical
vision per se. Indeed, one would unquestionably have to say that, for Henry,
ethics is not “first philosophy.”
Nevertheless, it should be admitted that in his very late writings on
Christianity, Henry does attempt to unfold explicitly what he calls a “Christian
ethic” (albeit a highly unorthodox one). It is this Christian ethic, in its relation
to Henry’s core insight of “clandestine ipseic life,” which will be the primary
concern of this paper. Important for our consideration is the clarification of
the following: (1) precisely how this clandestine ipseic life relates to Henry’s
unfolding of a fundamental ontology; (2) what key and specifically ethical
30 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

concern, or difficulty, arises for ipseic life in relation to this ontology; and (3) how
Henry’s articulation of what he calls the “Christian ethic”—and in particular,
the traditional Christian virtues—is intended by him to solve this difficulty.

Life as the ground of a fundamental ontology

If we are to speak of a Christian virtue ethic as being present in Henry’s thought,

then we at once need to ask what, for Henry, the ontological ground which
justifies, or determines, which virtues are to contribute to, and either wholly
or partially constitute, the flourishing of the human person is. We answer: that
ground is “Life”—less a “phenomenon” in itself for Henry than an originary
mode of phenomenality, and thus the core of what he unfolds throughout his
writings as a fundamental ontology.
Henry begins his massive opus, The Essence of Manifestation, by invoking
“the bond which unites the problem of truth with the problem of the ego at the
source of the two” (Henry 1973, 6 [Henry’s italics]). I say “invoking” here
purposefully, for “Life” serves, for Henry, as a sort of mantric effectivity intended
to reveal in a preecstatic phenomenality that which cannot be articulated as an
object within an ecstatic horizon, for it itself is the ground of all such horizons.
Henry, of course, was deeply influenced by Heidegger’s critique of the history of
Western ontotheology, and he himself also critiques that history as articulating
what he calls an “ontological monism”—that is, the view that there is but one
mode of phenomenality: namely, presence-in-the-light constituted ecstatically,
or, what Heidegger refers to as the beingness of beings. Henry’s whole project
is to articulate an ontological dualism, with ecstatic phenomenality as itself
grounded in a heretofore covered over—indeed, a forgotten—more originary
mode. That mode is ipseity, the phenomenological effectivity of Life’s
coming-into-itself-as-a-self, as auto-affecting itself, “a primal upwelling of
phenomenality” (Henry 1993, 26), “the mute immanence of its first being-to-
self, in the affectivity of pure self-sensing” (33). It is this self-revelation of Life
as ipseity, in and as all individual ipseities, which, for Henry, makes any and all
ecstatic phenomenality possible. But precisely how does it do so?
First of all, it is important to point out that the auto-affection of Life is, above
all, a relation. It is a relation between each individual self as ipseic life—that
is to say, each self precisely as a living one—and what Henry calls “absolute
Life,” eternally self-engendering as what he calls the “Arch-Ipseity” (a sort of
ipseic Platonic “Form” for Henry which in his later writings he identifies with
 “Disimpropriation” and Infused Virtue 31

Christ, the Logos), into the self-effective reality of which all individual living
selves are born. As such, absolute Life, auto-affecting and enjoying itself in and
as all individual selves, generates these selves within itself, through the Arch-
Ipseity, consubstantially. Now this self-generation of absolute Life in individual
ipseities constitutes, as Life’s self-revelation, Life’s preecstatic light. To that extent,
Henry proposes (as mentioned above), as over against ontological monism, an
ontological dualism, distinguishing sharply—even at times quite vehemently
and polemically—between an originary, preecstatic mode of phenomenality,
and the (historically privileged) ecstatic, representational mode, which he calls
the “light of the world.” Yet, Henry does not wish to say that these two modes are
completely detached from, or else ever in conflict with, one another. Rather, the
former is the ground and the very possibility of the latter. And this is because, as
Henry says, Life’s self-revelation is twofold. The first fold concerns the individual
self which receives itself in the givenness of itself to itself as born into Life’s self-
effective reality. To that extent, the givenness of the self is an always-already-
being-given-to-itself as a “me,” in passivity—prior to any active, existential
appropriation of itself as an “I.” This, then, brings us to the second fold of Life’s
double revelation. Insofar as in revelation, the self is originarily given to itself to
be a self, it must appropriate itself as such, come into active possession of itself,
in order to become so. However, it is originally able to actively appropriate itself
only because the revelation reveals not only the self ’s givenness to itself to be a
self, but also the appropriative structure in which it is given to itself to surpass
itself in its passivity toward its self-possession as an “I.” In other words, it is given
to itself to be a self, and that “being a self ” has always already been effectively
accomplished for it and given over to it. It is thus that, for Henry, in the double
revelation, the self given to itself originarily in pure passivity becomes a center
of orientation for itself, a situated self, and a powerful self, defined “organically”
as the “I can.”
Now as an appropriative accomplishment, such situatedness constitutes the
ecstatic structure itself as a structure of transcendence1 which allows for the
possibility of throwing out before oneself objects upon a horizon. Nevertheless,
in the inseparability of the two folds of the double revelation, Henry argues that
the self “maintains [or at least should maintain] itself close to itself ” even in its
movement out toward an ecstatic horizon. Henry writes:

The maintaining close to self of the act of transcendence in the original receptivity
wherein transcendence receives itself, discovers its Being, masters itself, controls
itself, coheres with self in the unity which makes it to be, to be what it is and what
32 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

permits it to act, the original affection of transcendence . . . the auto-affection

of transcendence . . . is the condition and the foundation of every ontological
affection by the world as of every affection by a being. (Henry 1973, 461)

This “original receptivity wherein transcendence receives itself . . .” is precisely

the second fold of the double revelation of Life—the fact that it reveals not
only the self ’s givenness to itself to be a self, but as well the very structural
accomplishment of its being so, namely, the appropriative or transcendent
structure. This original self-reception of transcendence and this “maintaining
close to self of the act of transcendence” in that original reception make it
possible for the self to undertake—in a properly phenomenological way—an
objectification of whatever has affected it, as if it is “life itself that entered into the
objectivity and brought itself before itself, giving itself to itself in and through
this objectivity” (as quotation appears in O’Sullivan 2006, 149). To that extent,
it can clearly be seen what Henry means when he invokes “the bond which
unites the problem of truth with the problem of the ego at the source of the two.”
The problem of truth is the problem of ecstatic phenomenality itself, the very
problem of the truth of beings—beings which in their beingness are grounded in
the truth of the ego (the self-appropriated self) which is revealed to itself as such
in the second fold of Life’s double revelation. The bond which unites the two
problems, therefore, is the affectivity of the appropriative structure, in which the
affectivity of the self “hetero-affected” by beings within the ecstatic horizon is
always already grounded in the auto-affectivity of Life giving itself to be a self in
individual selves. Thus the source is Life, in the upwellingly effective, ipseic first
fold of the double revelation revealed. And thus the “proper phenomenological
way” is that which maintains these two folds of the double revelation always in
their inseparability—so that when Henry speaks of Life ecstatically, when he
invokes Life mantrically (despite the fact that Life does not itself appear in the
ecstatic light), he does so (or claims he does so) from out of the very effectivity of
the self-revelation of Life itself, and to that extent it is “life itself that entered into
the objectivity and brought itself before itself, giving itself to itself in and through
this objectivity.”2 For Henry, this “proper phenomenological way” constitutes the
very possibility of fundamental ontology.3

The problem of forgetfulness of life

In the first section, we discussed how Henry’s core thought—that of “clandestine

ipseic life”—related to his unfolding of a fundamental ontology. Ipseic life is
 “Disimpropriation” and Infused Virtue 33

clandestine for Henry precisely because, as the foundation and condition for
the possibility of all ecstasis, it itself does not show itself in the ecstatic light—
unless, of course, a self-revealing, self-objectification of Life maintaining the
two folds of the double revelation in their inseparability is allowed to unfold
(such maintenance constituting the “proper phenomenological way”). In fact,
however, according to Henry, the proper phenomenological way has not been
the privileged way in Western philosophical and cultural history. It has, indeed,
been only a “forgotten” way. But why is it forgotten? Of course, a similar problem
vexed Heidegger, in his articulation of the covering over—the double covering
over—of the question of Being. And while Henry was himself deeply influenced
by Heidegger’s reraising of the question of Being, he came up with a rather
different answer. We need not go into the precise details of that particular debate
here—or of Henry’s quite unabashedly reductive reading of Heidegger. Suffice
it to say that, for both Heidegger and Henry, forgetfulness, or even “fallenness,”
is a possibility (if not an inevitability) of Western history which has unfolded
into a situation of extreme seriousness in the late twentieth to early twenty-
first centuries—a state of “cultural barbarism” (see Henry 2001), as Henry calls
it—from which, it seems, “only a god can save us” now.4
For Henry, of course, that “god” is Life. He articulates the problem of
forgetfulness of that Life as follows. We are “fallen,” and this is for two closely
interconnected reasons. The first reason is of ontological import: namely, on
account of the inherent structural possibility of forgetfulness of Life, which is
itself twofold (in accordance with the twofoldness of the double revelation):
(1) Life does not (originarily speaking) show itself in the ecstatic light; rather
it reveals itself in affectivity prior to any ecstatic horizon, in the double
revelation’s first fold. And since Life does not show itself in the ecstatic light, (2)
the illusion of the self-sufficient ego is made possible (although not inevitable)
in the double revelation’s second fold. There is, in other words, the possibility
(if not the inevitability) of separating the two folds of the double revelation.
For the egoistic self can, indeed, utterly fail to maintain itself close to itself in
Life, and thereby does it assume only itself as its essential ground. Interestingly,
however, this very possibility of what I like to call “impropriation”5 is important
for Henry: it has a certain ethical import of its own, with regard specifically
to the moral Personality of absolute Life itself as the Arch-Ipseity. For Life,
in giving itself to be a self in each individual self, does not simply make a
(precisely unliving) puppet for itself. Rather, as Henry writes, “in making
the ego a living person, Life has not made a pseudoperson. It does not take
back with one hand what it has given with the other” (Henry 2003, 141). The
34 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

ontological possibility of “impropriation” thus renders a sort of distance of

filiality between the individual self and absolute Life—a distance and a relation
notwithstanding and irreducible to the consubstantiality with Life into which
all individuals are born. We are, as Henry says, “sons within the Arch-Son” that
is the Arch-Ipseity.6
Now this ontological possibility of forgetfulness—in which, it seems,
we always already find ourselves7—leads us to the second main reason for
forgetfulness (and especially for the persistence of forgetfulness) of Life: namely,
a certain existential outgrowth of the ontological situation whereby the self, in
establishing itself as the very source and foundation of all its powers, becomes
solicitous in all its activities, precisely because it denies its true source of power
which alone can provide for it a secure foundation. It even misunderstands
its essential passivity in its givenness to itself in Life (in the first fold of the
double revelation) as the radical powerlessness and failure of the self, rather
than as the very condition for the possibility of its distinct action and power.
Moreover, the existential anxiety that it suffers on account of its lack of a secure
foundation in itself often obscures its own feelings of itself as an affected self
in the truth of its appropriative structure which opens the ecstasis within itself.
It is in this desperate situation, then, that the self throws its very self out before
itself as an object (in the attempt to secure itself), and in doing so ends up
referring everything and everybody only to its anxious concerns for its own
projected being. Henry writes:

Not content just with attributing everything it does to itself, it even poses itself as
the unique goal of all its actions, caring for things, other people, and itself only
with itself in view. So it is in its very action and each of its acts that it has lost
the essence of action . . . . In the action of the ego as action, supposedly issuing
from itself and aimed only at itself, the very essence of absolute Life is ruled out.
(Henry 2003, 168)

In such a situation, the self in its own truth as the expression of the appropriative
structure (i.e., the second fold of the double revelation of Life) is no longer even
possible. It may be true, as Henry says, that absolute Life has given with one
hand to the self its life and its freedom and power and has not taken back with
the other. But actually, in the desperation of such a situation, in the self ’s self-
abandonment, the self has already given itself and its freedom and its power
away to the world, and lost itself in its truth and its effectivity, as well as in its
filial relation to absolute Life. Consequently, the self in self-abandonment is
 “Disimpropriation” and Infused Virtue 35

bankrupt and empty. And thus, says Henry, the rampant “barbarism” of our
modern culture, of the self ’s objectification and of its violent betrayal in the
ecstatic light of the world.

Life’s eudaimonic claim and the phenomenological

paradox of recollection

As mentioned previously, Henry’s ethics is more or less entirely subsumed

into his articulation of fundamental ontology. Natalie Depraz argues that if
there is an ethics at all operative Henry’s work, it lies implicitly in the “absolute
right of life in general. Life is the sole condition of possibility of any action or
thought” (Depraz 2002, 524). Could this “absolute right of life,” in its claim on
the individual self, be anything apart from its ontological claim? Or, ethically
speaking, might the distance of filiality, which, above all, makes “impropriation”
possible, be irreducible to the ontological claim of consubstantiality? What does
Life, after all, demand from the (precisely living) person?
Actually, we are venturing here into terrain which Henry himself only
partially unfolded, and at that only in his very late writings. In what follows, I
will try to draw out some of what is implied by Henry’s thought in relation to
the question of ethics in his work. It would be consistent with his thinking, for
example, to say that Life simply seeks—because that is the very essence of its
Being—to live. But, of course, Life is always living: at no time can Life not be just
what it is, namely, the Living One. And yet, there is a sense in which Life does
not quite live, universally through all ipseities, bound as they are in their state of
forgetfulness, in the perfect fullness of itself as the Arch-Ipseity. This is because,
according to Henry, its effective potency, or Life’s energies of self-expression, is
not able, in the forgetful individual ipseity, to perfectly unfold. Life’s own perfect
fulfillment is accomplished through the full revelation in and as all individual
ipseities of its own Living Being. Furthermore, since Life’s self-generation as the
Arch-Ipseity is, for Henry, consubstantial with the ipseity that is each individual
self, the eudaimonic fulfillment of the latter must be understood on the basis of
the originary nature and “goal” of the former: namely, to live, and to live more
abundantly (John 10:10), precisely by “maintaining the self close to itself ” in all
its ecstatic action. That is to say, the individual self must live close to its essence
as always already given to itself in Life, and as consubstantially enjoyed by Life
as Life’s own self; and yet, within its filial distance from Life, living as Life’s son.
36 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

The eudaimonic fulfillment of the individual is thus the openness, in the second
fold of the double revelation, to the unfurling of Life’s own powers within
oneself, and through oneself ecstatically out onto the horizon of the world,
objectifying the objects within that horizon in the “proper phenomenological
way.” Life’s claim to this from the individual as a “right” consists distinctly in
the fact that it is Life itself that gives for all individual selves, and thus, too, for
all horizons of the world.
To that extent, there is certainly in Henry’s thinking an implicit assumption
that individual selves have an obligation to overcome their forgetfulness of Life—
even within the context of their filial distance—and this so as to allow for Life’s
perfect fulfillment, as well as for their own. But this obligation is not something
that is imposed upon individual selves from the outside; rather, it comes from
within them in the form of a “call.” For it is Life itself auto-affecting itself from
within, and stirring itself within them in the attempt to more fully and perfectly
unfurl itself, that awakens individual selves to the obligation.8
Yet here a paradox arises. If one is called by Life—necessarily, because it
is one’s own essence—a certain turning away from the world and toward the
essence “within” needs to occur. Now the essence auto-affects itself, and in so
doing affects the ego as well. However, in forgetfulness, the ego imagines itself
to be the source of its own powers and orientation. As such, it experiences this
affection as though it came from something other than itself—other than itself
and yet paradoxically within itself. To that extent, it is hetero-affected by Life in
a similar fashion to the way in which it is hetero-affected by things within the
ecstatic horizon. It experiences the affection by Life only in this way because
the passivity of its givenness to itself in Life, and thus its consubstantiality with
Life—in the first fold of the double revelation—is here still concealed from it.
For this very reason, the ego ends up opening what might be called an “interior
ecstasis,” casting before itself in an objectification the obscurely felt beckoning
essence (Life) which calls to the ego from within its own “depths” (that is to
say, from the ego’s very source). But the problem is that the essence does not
let itself be seen as such in the ecstatic light. How, then, does the obligation
and the attempt to overcome forgetfulness proceed? For that matter, how does
phenomenology itself proceed (for it is important to remember that, for Henry,
there is an inextricable bond between the overcoming of forgetfulness and
the phenomenological method itself whose task it is to denounce ontological
monism)? According to Henry, a “critical transformation” is required. For even
if phenomenology were to bracket out the naïve assumption of the “natural
attitude” that the essence simply exists, as though it were just like any other
 “Disimpropriation” and Infused Virtue 37

object in the world (albeit an interior or ideal object, existing within an interior
or ideal horizon), nevertheless it can only ever proceed negatively, namely, by
denouncing its “impropriated” power for such an ecstatic projection. According
to Henry, in order for phenomenology—and thus, too, for ethics—to proceed
positively, phenomenology itself must undergo “this critical transformation . . . to
a phenomenology whose phenomenality is Life and no longer the world” (Henry
2003, 85). How this transformation comes about, however, in its self-effectivity,
is ultimately the very problem of phenomenology as a method. It is also the very
core of Henry’s Christian virtue ethics, which we shall look at more closely in
the next section.

Henry’s (christian) ethics: “Disimpropriation”

and infused virtue

In Chapter 10 of I Am the Truth: Towards a Philosophy of Christianity, Henry

unfolds what he calls “The Christian Ethic.” Much of the discussion follows the
apostle Paul’s teaching on the inefficacy of the Law. For Henry, the Law’s inefficacy
lies in the fact that it is articulated ecstatically, in the light of the world. The Law
permits or forbids actions of the self, but it gives no power to the living self to
act in accordance with its commands, since it does not itself reveal the unique
source of that power. Furthermore, it is possible, as Jesus himself argued, to abide
outwardly by the Law while nevertheless having an improper inner orientation.
This happens, for example (in more phenomenological terms), if one who has
“impropriated” Life’s powers undertakes so-called “righteous acts” only for the
sake of the ego’s self-aggrandizement, in the (perhaps even largely unconscious)
effort to existentially secure oneself as one’s own ontological ground. As opposed
to the “Old Law,” then—that is, the Law of the world’s truth and the world’s
light—Henry interprets the “New Law,” the Law of Life, as the core of the
Christian Ethic: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all
your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment.
And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two
commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 22:37-40). For
Henry, the efficacy of this “New Law”9—that is to say, its real power to bring
about its own fulfillment in the living self—lies in the fact that it . . .

only commands as a function of what Life is. The Commandment is only a

Commandment of love because Life is love. Life is love because it experiences
itself infinitely and eternally. . . . It is because God (as absolute Life) is love that
38 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

he commands love. He commands it of all the living by giving them life, by

generating them in himself as Sons. . . . In Christianity the Commandment of
love is not an ethical law, nor is it addressed to a person who has to be persuaded
(one knows not how) to love. In the Commandment of love, Christianity is
addressed to a Son, to someone who, given to himself in life’s self-giving and thus
in the infinite love that absolute Life bears within itself, bears this love within
himself as what engenders him at each moment. (Henry 2003, 186–7)

Furthermore, it is on the basis of this first commandment of love (loving

God) that the second is also possible (to love others as one loves oneself). For
consubstantial with absolute Life in one’s engendered ipseity, in one’s livingness,
necessarily one is consubstantial with all other ipseic selves as well.10 The second
commandment is thus no less accomplished than the first as a function of
absolute Life itself.
Here, however, a question arises. Henry even poses it himself: “if in the New
Law the Commandment is Life, if it carries within it reality and realization, and
is already realized in each living person, then can we still give it a name? Is
an ethic even conceivable if everything is accomplished once and for all, if no
task remains, no Law to indicate what it is, no liberty to submit to?” (Henry
2003, 183). In answer to this question, it is necessary to remember that the
full realization of the fact that Life is love, and thus of the fact that one cannot
not “obey” the commandment to love already in living, depends upon the full
phenomenological self-effectivity of the Life within one. It depends upon a proper
appropriation of the self and of Life’s powers within one; it depends upon the
“maintaining close to self of the self ” in all of one’s actions, the maintenance as
inseparable of the two folds of the double revelation. In other words, it depends
upon the self ’s full overcoming of forgetfulness of one’s givenness to oneself
in Life—as Henry says, upon being reborn into absolute Life in one’s original
condition as a son. To that extent, we are still faced with the same problem: how
does such rebirth take place if not by the self ’s own “impropriative” effort? And
what, if anything at all, can the individual self do to help such a rebirth along?
This problem plagues Henry’s ethics just as it plagues the phenomenological
method itself: how to arrive at the recollection of absolute Life within one
without turning back upon that Life and casting it as though onto some interior
ecstatic horizon to be possessed and ultimately to be mastered there as an object.
The opening of an interior ecstasis would be, for Henry, inherently an “improper
phenomenological way” in that it simply posits the essence that is Life as a
metaphysical ideal goal; it merely reiterates the “impropriation” of the ego which
 “Disimpropriation” and Infused Virtue 39

improperly grounds itself and its powers of appropriation given to it by Life in

itself. It seeks—as did Augustine in his vain attempt to repeat his ascent to the
Neo-Platonic “One” by way of his own powers—to storm the gates of heaven, as
it were, or to enter the essence without passing through the gate, through the
Arch-Ipseity (i.e., without submitting oneself to the essential passivity in which
Life gives one to oneself in itself)—in the manner of thieves and robbers. “I tell
you the truth, the man who does not enter the sheep pen by the gate, but climbs
in by some other way, is a thief and a robber” (John 10:1, as quotation appears in
Henry 2003, 118). In other words, the “impropriation” of the essence by the self
is not only not ultimately ontologically possible, but any attempt at it is deeply
unethical. So how does one overcome forgetfulness? Henry’s answer: through
“acts of mercy.”
Traditionally, acts of mercy (or “works of mercy,” in the Roman Catholic,
Eastern Orthodox, and Methodist Churches especially) are held to be a means of
grace (rather than an effect of grace, as in the Lutheran and Reform Churches),
and thus to aid one in sanctification. They are divided into two categories: (1)
the corporal works of mercy, including feeding the hungry, giving drink to
the thirsty, sheltering the homeless, clothing the naked, visiting prisoners (or
ransoming captives), visiting the sick, and burying the dead; and (2) the spiritual
works of mercy, including instructing the uninformed, counseling the doubtful,
admonishing sinners, bearing wrongs patiently, forgiving offenses willingly,
comforting the afflicted, and praying for the living, the sick, and the dead. It
must be pointed out, however, that it is not just the acts themselves, but the
inner orientation of the heart which is important in carrying them out. They
must be done in the proper spirit, in the proper proportion and manner so as
to directly address the nature and measure of distress of the person being aided,
and in accordance with the level of one’s own capacities as well. In other words,
a certain practical wisdom must be applied in carrying out works of mercy—
which necessarily calls forth the traditional virtues of, for example, prudence
and temperance (among the “cardinal” Christian virtues); patience, kindness,
and humility (among the “heavenly” ones); and, above all, love (agape) (among
the “theological” virtues).
The focus, to that extent, of the performance of works of mercy is not exactly
the “other” as such, nor the character of the acts themselves (although these
things are not entirely insignificant), but the cultivation of a certain inner
orientation or virtue. As Henry writes: “it is neither the neighbor nor the mercy
with which we should treat him that explains the way of acting required by the
40 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

Christian ethic” (Henry 2003, 168). Rather, one might say in phenomenological
terms, it is a matter of bringing about the ego’s “disimpropriation” of itself
and its powers. To that extent, paradoxically, the remedy for overcoming
the forgetting of the self in its givenness to itself in absolute Life is precisely
also a forgetting of sorts, but of an altogether different kind—namely, the
“impropriative” ego’s forgetting of its solicitous self-concern and existential
anxiety. Indeed, the very fact that it has concerns about its being at all is itself
only a symptom of the impropriative attempt (despite the impossibility of
success) to ground itself and its powers in its own being. Moreover, even after
it comes to the realization that its “true life” cannot be unfolded on the basis of
its own self as ground, yet if it impropriatively attempts to return to its essence
by its own powers—through the opening of an interior ecstasis—it is no less
“concupiscent” in its being. Its action still constitutes a grasping after precisely
the effectivity of its essence as after an ideal object which it would possess
and over which it would have intentional mastery in order to secure itself
in its being.11 Indeed, this tendency toward concupiscence of the ego in its
existential desperation which causes it to grasp after its own essence as after
an object is precisely why Henry promotes acts of mercy:

Only the work of mercy practices the forgetting of self in which, all interest for the Self
(right down to the idea of what we call a self or a me) now removed, no obstacle is
now posed to the unfurling of life in this Self extended to its original essence. (Henry
2003, 170 [Henry’s italics])

Now this “unfurling of life in this Self ” is what is most significant for Henry:
a releasing and expressive extension of the heretofore suppressed energy and
power—or rather “hyper-power,” as he calls it—of absolute Life in and through
the individual ipseity. Such a release amounts to a distinct transmutation in the
being which itself constitutes the overcoming of the forgetting of the self in its
essence. Henry writes:

In works of mercy—and this is why they are “works”—a decisive transmutation takes
place by which the ego’s power is extended to the hyper-power of absolute Life in
which it is given to itself. In such a transmutation, the ego forgets itself, so that in
and through this forgetting an essential Ipseity is revealed—not its own Self but
precisely what gives this self to itself by making it a Self, absolute Life’s self-giving
in the Ipseity of which this life gives itself. It is no longer me who acts, it is the
Arch-Son who acts in me. And this is because “I no longer live, but Christ lives in
me” [Galatians 2:20]. (Henry 2003, 169)
 “Disimpropriation” and Infused Virtue 41

We can now see the key both to Henry’s ethics and to his understanding of the
phenomenological method more generally. The “critical transformation . . . to a
phenomenology whose phenomenality is Life and no longer the world” (Henry
2003, 85) is precisely the same as the “decisive transmutation . . . by which the
ego’s power is extended to the hyper-power of absolute Life.” In other words, it
is the ego’s rebirth through the reunion in their original inseparability of the
two folds of the double revelation. Such a reunion comes about in an interesting
way, ethically speaking: first, through a “disimpropriating” phenomenological
reduction (of the attempt to establish oneself in one’s own ground) which is
accomplished in the forgetting of self (i.e., forgetting of a different kind: of the
self in one’s obsessive existential concern) which characterizes the performance
of acts of mercy; and second, to the extent that such a disimpropriation opens
one and prepares one for the revelation and the unfurling of absolute Life’s
“hyper-power” within one, thus through the infusion of that hyper-power, from
the first through the second fold of the double revelation, and from there out into
the world. It should be noted, of course, that among those traditional Christian
virtues mentioned above which accompany the works of mercy, love, as one of
the theological virtues (“faith, hope and love, these three: but the greatest of
these is love” [Corinthians 13:13]) is of a different nature than the cardinal or the
heavenly virtues, since in traditional Christian teaching the theological virtues
are rather infused into the soul by God than cultivated through human effort.
Disimpropriation, of course, purifies one and prepares one for that infusion—
but the illumination itself (as the infusion) comes from God. For Henry, the
“critical transformation” of phenomenology, the “transmutation” to the hyper-
power of absolute Life, comes from Life itself—to whose hyper-power one now,
as the reborn son of absolute Life, becomes a witness. This is what it means, for
Henry, to do the Father’s Will:

To do the Heavenly Father’s Will is to let the relation to the self that joins the
singular Self to itself be accomplished, just like the relation to itself of absolute
Life—for the living man it is to let life be accomplished in himself like the very Life
of God. (Henry 2003, 166)

For Henry, then, acts of mercy, or works of mercy, are means of “grace” in
the sense that they aid the forgetful one, who has nevertheless been interiorly
(albeit obscurely) called to the truth of his being in Life, in the effort of
“disimpropriation” of Life’s powers within him—disimpropriation being the
ethically called-for phenomenological reduction necessary for overcoming
42 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

forgetfulness; disimpropriation then prepares the (at this point still) forgetful
(albeit now anticipatory) one for the infusion of the theological virtue of love—
which infusion is, for Henry, the “decisive transmutation” which originarily
reveals, in the inseparability of the revelation’s two folds, the gift to each self of
Life’s self-effective “clandestine ipseic life” in the individual, which is constitutive
of fundamental ontology. The one concern remaining, in my mind, is the extent
to which Henry really is able to preserve the distance of filiality in the self ’s mere
witnessing of the unfurling of the hyper-power of absolute Life within itself.
Has Life, in fact, made merely a pseudoperson, or not? That question cannot be
answered here.

Notes

1 In phenomenology, the terms “immanence” and “transcendence” have technical

meanings which are in many ways quite contrary to the meanings traditionally
given to these words which more or less depend on a Judeo-Christian worldview.
In Husserl, “transcendence” is sometimes used in a more traditional sense,
referring to “metaphysical” or “other-worldly” concerns which have to be
bracketed out; but it is also used in the same sense of basically any idea or concept
of the world that we have in the “natural attitude,” and which is not based in
immediate intuition. However, because of Husserl’s privileging of intentionality in
his famous “principle of principles,” it is inevitable that “transcendence” comes also
to mean the throwing outside itself of consciousness, whereby an ecstatic horizon
or “world” is opened. It is in this sense especially that “transcendence” is used by
both Heidegger and Henry. “Immanence,” by contrast, refers generally to what is
given in immediate intuition, or immediate impressionality. This, too, differs from
the traditional Judeo-Christian understanding of immanence, which has rather
to do (rather naïvely, Husserl would say) with the “this-worldly” orientation of
the “natural attitude.” Further, “transcendence” is to be distinguished from the
“transcendental,” which refers in both Husserl and Henry to the foundation and
condition of possibility of all transcendence, such as in Husserl’s conception of the
Transcendental Ego, or Henry’s conception of ipseity or auto-affection as a radical
immanence, since it is wholly and immediately effective auto-impressionality.
Thus, in Henry, the phrase “transcendental immanence” is perfectly coherent and
is used by him to characterize the phenomenality of Life’s coming-into-itself as the
Arch-Ipseity, which is the ground of Henry’s fundamental ontology.
2 Henry (2003) draws a parallel between the effectivity of the proper
phenomenological method and the effectivity as the self-revealing, self-
objectification of Life in and through Christ’s “I Am” sayings.
 “Disimpropriation” and Infused Virtue 43

3 A full treatment of the range of phenomenological complications that open

up at just this point in Henry’s thinking is simply beyond the scope of this
paper. Among those that I have treated elsewhere in some depth (Rebidoux
2012), I will just mention here the following: (1) whether Henry has not taken
a phenomenologically illegitimate leap, indeed an onto-theological leap, from
the radical ipseic immanence of a single life (his own) to an absolute Life which
supposedly generates, through an Arch-Ipseity, all ipseic lives consubstantially
within itself; (2) whether Henry’s articulation of the “proper phenomenological
way” does not, in the attempt to justify such a leap methodologically, illegitimately
(because circularly) establish precisely the phenomenological “properness” of
his objectification of absolute Life on the basis of Life’s own auto-objectification
through Henry’s “phenomenologically proper” writing; (3) whether Henry
does not fall into the problem of solipsism, in failing to demonstrate how any
individual ipseity, defined as it is by pure immanence to itself, would be capable
of recognizing other ipseities within absolute Life, and with whom each ipseity
would also be consubstantial, as distinct from itself; (4) whether Henry’s so-called
“fundamental ontology,” substantially defined as ipseity (at the risk of solipsism),
can truly account for the being of nonipseic beings except as ecstatic self-
projections of ipseity (or of the Arch-Ipseity).
4 Heidegger’s famous utterance from the Spiegel interview of 1966 (Heidegger 1976).
5 The coinage is mine, not Henry’s, and simply refers to an “improper” form of self-
appropriation, as discussed in this section.
6 The “Arch-Son,” of course, is the Logos of the eternally self-engendering Father
that is absolute Life, as articulated in Henry’s later Christian writings. The phrase
“distance of filiality” is not Henry’s, nor does he really adequately explore the
phenomenological difference between the individual son and the Arch-Son into
which all living selves are born; rather, he largely emphasizes throughout his work
the identity of the individual ipseic life in its consubstantiality of affectivity with
Life. Nevertheless, I explore the idea of filial distance, a phrase suggested by Jean-
Luc Marion in his own work, as a possible ethical implication of some of Henry’s
other statements, such as, as quoted above, that “Life has not made a pseudo-
person,” and the like.
7 One might consider this to be Henry’s (highly unorthodox) version of the
doctrine of Original Sin. Christ, as the incarnate Arch-Ipseity, to that extent, is
sent to reveal Life as the essence consubstantial with the ipseity of all selves—thus
giving to Henry’s interpretation of Christianity a quasi-Gnostic ring.
8 The idea that Life calls to the self from within, thus awakening it to the obligation
to overcome its forgetfulness of Life, implies a distinct theory of recollection
in Henry; it also makes clearer the connection that Henry finds between
his thought of Life and the tradition of psychoanalysis with its focus on the
unconscious.
44 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

9 Of course, it is not these commandments themselves which are new (the first
commandment is already given in Deuteronomy 6:5, the second in Leviticus
19:18), but the way in which these two are interpreted as being the (possibility of
the) fulfillment of all the others.
10 Here arises one of the key phenomenological problems in Henry’s thinking as
mentioned above (in note 3): whether Henry does not fall into the problem of
solipsism, in failing to demonstrate how any individual ipseity, defined as it is by
pure affective immanence to itself, would be capable of recognizing other ipseities
within Life, and with whom each ipseity would also be consubstantial, as distinct
from itself.
11 There is a certain sense in which the philosophical and even spiritual desire to
accomplish oneself in one’s own ground is the ultimate form of concupiscence of
the flesh. The would-be mystic, for example, on his meditative journey “inward”
does not so much overcome the concupiscence of his flesh (although he withdraws
his attention from the world) as turn that concupiscence inward, toward an
“interior absolute.” But as an interior absolute which “appears” not by way of a
revelation from an “Other” as much as by the flesh’s own negation of itself and
through its intentional positing of an ideal, it is still an idol. Indeed, Henry would
say that this is the inevitable paradox of not only a self-willful spiritual pursuit
of God, but of any phenomenology that actively seeks the essence by opening an
interior ecstasis.
 3

Being and Virtuousness: Toward a

Platonic-Heideggerian Virtue Ethics
Matthew King

Introduction

In the following, I will sketch a virtue ethics that draws its inspiration from
Plato and from Heidegger.1 I believe that by combining the insights of these two
philosophers, we can arrive at a virtue ethics that is acceptable because its account
of the virtues is grounded in an account of the good. The importance of Plato for
an acceptable virtue ethics has both formal and substantive aspects. The formal
aspect has to do with Plato’s emphasis that the virtues are what they are as virtues
due to their relation to the good, that is, that to be a virtue is to be conducive
to the good.2 The substantive aspect has to do with what I take to be Plato’s
suggestion as to what the good in fact is. In my view, this suggestion is almost
right, and with Heidegger’s help, we can make it right. Though Heidegger has
next to nothing to say about ethics, I propose that what Heideggerian thinking
is after—which I will call the responding-opening of being—is the good. The
means by which this good is sought, the “method” of Heideggerian thinking,
very broadly speaking—namely, phenomenology, in, again, a very broad sense,
which I will describe below—is therefore the cardinal virtue.
What Plato has Socrates say positively about the good in the Republic is that
it is the source not only of things’ goodness but also of their ability to be known
and even of their very being (Republic, 509b). The means by which the good is
to be found is called “dialectic,” which Socrates says is a kind of conversation
characterized as a philosophical method by the fact that it allows itself to be
led by the forms (454a). In perhaps the most crucial passage of the Republic,
Socrates apparently refuses a request to give a detailed account of how dialectic
works and how it leads to its end in the discovery of the good, but he does so
46 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

in words that echo what he has said earlier about his inability to give a detailed,
literal account of the good, such that it becomes unclear whether he is now
referring to dialectic or to the good: “you would no longer be seeing an image
of what we’re describing, but the truth itself ” (533a). In my view, Plato means
this ambiguity between dialectic and the good to suggest that dialectic is not
only the means to the good, but is in fact the good itself.3 This should not be
surprising given that dialectic is to philosophy for Plato as phenomenology is
to philosophy for Heidegger: it is simply the procedure of philosophy, at least
when philosophy is being done as it should be done. If the philosophical pursuit
of wisdom is to be distinguished from the sophistic pretense to have wisdom,
then philosophy has no end outside itself at which it can arrive.4 The perpetually
deferred end of philosophy is internal to philosophy itself: it is the ever-widening
apprehension and description of what is. Once one sees this, one sees that the
real end of philosophy is the pursuit of the perpetually deferred end; to possess
the virtue of wisdom is to be engaged in the philosophical pursuit of wisdom.
Platonic philosophy, construed in this way, is, so to speak, what Heideggerian
phenomenological thinking would be if the ontological difference between
being and beings were subtracted from it. Whereas the Platonic philosopher
seeks an ever-opening responsive engagement with what is, the Heideggerian
phenomenologist seeks an ever-opening responsive engagement with being
itself (which is “opening” in the sense of the later Heidegger’s central term
Lichtung, with which he refers to our being the “site” in which the happening of
being takes place, but also ever-opening in that its practitioner seeks to cultivate
attention and responsiveness to the happening of being, such that these will not
be as rare as they normally are for us).5
I will proceed with this sketch of a Platonic-Heidegger virtue ethics by laying
out the logic of the following claims (though it will be a much larger project to
adequately demonstrate them):

1. The good consists in the responding-opening of being.

2. Phenomenology (in a very broad Heideggerian sense) is the means by
which this responding-opening takes place.
3. Since a practice is virtuous insofar as it is conducive to the good,
phenomenology is virtuous, and in fact the cardinal virtue.
4. A virtuous person is one in whom is cultivated the habitual practice
of phenomenology (but not necessarily of the disciplined practice of
phenomenological philosophy, for which what I will call “everyday
phenomenology” is the basis).
 Being and Virtuousness 47

5. A state that I call “deep happiness” is our main affective attunement to

the opening of being, and so the virtuous practice of phenomenology
contributes to our happiness in the most important sense.
6. Since by attending to the attunement of deep happiness we become more
responsive to the opening of being, states of deep happiness are themselves
conducive to the virtuous practice of phenomenology; being deeply happy is
thus itself a virtue to be cultivated.

Heidegger and the good

All six of the claims above may be controversial, but the first one is the most
obviously controversial, in terms of both its form and its content. Philosophy
long ago gave up trying to say what the good (the very good itself!) is, whether
because it has been thought that (a) the good is, as G. E. Moore put it, unanalyzably
simple (i.e., the good is some one thing, but there is no way to say exactly what
it is except with the words “the good”) (Moore 1993, §13), or (b) goods are
irreducibly varied, with no one goodness common to them and accounting for
their all being good, or (c) the semantic field of the word “goodness” or concept
of goodness (like any other word or concept) does not and cannot have precise
borders that philosophers can specify, or (d) goodness is relative or context-
dependent, such that there is nothing that is simply or absolutely good.
Whether or not (d) can be maintained depends on whether a satisfactory
account of the good can be given. But (a), (b), and (c) are all serious threats
to the project of trying to give such an account and must be responded to
beforehand. My response to all three is this: whether or not we can say exactly
what is essential to phenomena of goodness, I take it that the proper aim of a
philosophical account of the good is to give a description of the good that helps
bring into view what is most important about phenomena of goodness. What is
wanted is not to say it in such a way that it is represented exactly, but to say it
in such a way as to show it to us, to help us to see the phenomenon itself. While
philosophers always ought to recognize that they have no authority to serve as
language- or concept-police, this does not entail that philosophers should not
try to identify what is most important on the semantic or conceptual terrain
of a word or concept. Of course, an appeal to “importance” where the good is
concerned may appear to risk circularity. To say that something is important is
to invite the question “important in relation to what good end?” It seems as if
the good must be specified prior to the determination of anything’s importance.
48 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

This may be true as far as it goes. However, things (including actions and other
events) must at least be capable of importance for them to be good (or not). The
first question that must be dealt with, then, is what makes something capable of
importance. What can possibly make anything we do important—really, simply,
important, and not just important to us? This question may become clearer if
we put it this way: what can possibly make it important that we human beings
exist at all? If we did not exist, why would it be an important matter whether
we came into existence or not? If we ceased to exist, why would it be important
that we had existed? If it is not important that we exist, then nothing about our
existence can be simply good—it can only be good for us.6 Showing why it is
important will indicate the good in relation to which it is important.
What we can see with Heidegger’s help about why it is important that human
beings7 exist is that being needs us. There are three verbs that Heidegger uses
repeatedly in his later work to describe the relationship between human beings
and being: to belong (gehören), to listen (hören), and to respond (entsprechen).8
As those who belong to being (i.e., those to whom it is proper to relate to being
as such, as opposed to inanimate objects which have no relation with being at all
and nonhuman animals which relate to being without any awareness of doing
so), we “listen” to being, and we respond to being out of this listening. And as he
says in Being and Time, the being of beings consists in the phenomenon, where
“phenomenon” is to be understood as the “self-showing” of what is (Heidegger
1996, 35). But the phenomenon is nothing apart from the being that receives
it—there is no self-showing apart from the being for whom there is the showing.
Without that receptive being, being itself is like a movie being projected into
empty space; for there to be a movie, the projection needs to encounter a
screen. Without our reception of being, being is, to call upon a word of the later
Heidegger’s, a “destining” without a destination. Being is unfulfilled as being
unless we receive it, and its happening passes unmarked unless we respond to
our reception of it. Human existence is important, not only for human beings,
but for being itself, because it allows being to take place.
Supposing that this is what makes human existence important, what does it
have to do with what human beings ought to do—with ethics? The one significant
place that Heidegger raises the question of ethics explicitly is the “Letter on
‘Humanism’.” There, tracing the word “ethics” to its Greek etymological and
conceptual roots, he says this: “If the name ‘ethics,’ in keeping with the basic
meaning of the word ēthos, should now say that ethics ponders the abode of
the human being, then that thinking which thinks the truth of being”—i.e.,
 Being and Virtuousness 49

being’s unconcealment of itself to us—“as the primordial element of the human

being”—i.e., as what belongs most properly to us as human beings—“as one who
eksists, is in itself originary ethics. However, this thinking is not ethics in the first
instance because it is ontology” (Heidegger 1998, 271). When Heidegger says
that this thinking is not ethics, he is thinking of “ethics” in the sense of “rules that
say how the human being, experienced from ek-sistence toward being, ought to
live in a fitting manner” (268). But if we think of ethics as including the inquiry
into that on the basis of which directives for living in a fitting manner are to be
sanctioned, then, as Heidegger says, ontology is “originary ethics.”
It is, after all, plainly obvious that for Heidegger the question of being is
at the same time the question of the good, since for Heidegger—at least, after
Being and Time—“Seinsvergessenheit,” the forgetting or oblivion of being,
is the “danger” with which humankind is faced. One of the main themes of
Heidegger’s series of four “Bremen lectures” of 1949 is the danger posed by
the way being presents itself to us in the current technological epoch, which
Heidegger gives the name “Ge-Stell,” commonly translated as “enframing” (but
perhaps better as “be-setting”). In “The Question Concerning Technology,”
Heidegger writes that “enframing blocks the shining-forth and holding-sway of
truth” (Heidegger 1977b, 28), where “truth” is to be understood in Heidegger’s
sense of alētheia, that is, “unconcealment.” What Heidegger means by this is
that, in the technological epoch, where everything that is characteristically
shows up to us as a manifestation of human will, as means to human ends, it
becomes impossible for the happening of being as such to make itself apparent
to us. Hence, Heidegger continues, “the destining that sends [being] in [the
form of] ordering [Bestellen; i.e., ordering to stand ready for human purposes]
is consequently the extreme danger.” The realization of the extreme danger can
be nothing other than the extreme evil. Of course, identifying the blocking
of being’s apparentness to us as the extreme evil, the worst thing there could
be—which follows directly from identifying the responding-opening of being
as the good—might seem implausible if not offensive. Certainly the political
circumstances in which Heidegger spoke of “the danger” of the technological
epoch could make a Heideggerian view of the good hopelessly suspect from the
outset.9 After all, there is nothing to say that a world where we are completely
cut off from being’s happening might not be a more just world than our own.
Suppose that such a world were completely liberated from all forms of oppression
inflicted by some people on others; it is hard to say that such a world would not
be better than our own. I think that what we can say on my view of the good
50 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

is that such a world would be better than our own in some important ways—
justice is after all a good thing, one of the most important good things—but
it also would be worse in a way that is yet more important. For we need to ask
what good the perfect justice of such a world would serve. We need, after all, an
answer to the question that motivates the Republic: why be just? What is justice
good for? Why is it important to be just?
Still, again, even if our capacity to respondingly allow for the opening of being
is what makes human existence important, even if this is what human existence
is “good for” in a “cosmic” sense, is this the good that could be the proper ground
of any ethics? Consider what is wanted in an account of the good. Such an
account must explain (or at least it must be at the foundation of an explanation)
of the goodness of all good things. In particular, it must be possible to show that
any virtue—anything that we recognize as a way of being good in the ethical
sense—is a virtue due to its being conducive to the good. Some virtues will be
more and others less directly conducive to the good. Plato sometimes suggests
that wisdom is the cardinal virtue, meaning that the virtuousness of all other
virtues is derivative of or can be explained with reference to the virtuousness
of wisdom. On the view that I am developing, phenomenology is the cardinal
virtue. Insofar as any activity is virtuous, it contributes to the phenomenological
opening of and responding to being. After phenomenology as such, one of
the virtues most closely related to the good is charity (loosely in the sense of
agapē or caritas): to be charitable is to be generously open to and supportive
of different others, allowing not only for engagements with each other’s being
to take place between oneself and those others, but for those others to have
the space in which to be open to the happening of being in other ways.10 The
virtue of justice is more indirectly related, as is indicated by the common idea
that the apparent claims of justice often find themselves in tension with the
claims of the good: just actions, in the sense of those that embody appropriate
respect for others, make their contribution by encouraging people to feel that
it is worthwhile to associate with others; justice prevents the closing-off of the
social space necessary for pursuit of the good.

Heideggerian phenomenology

The activity that carries out the responding-opening of being can be called
“phenomenology” in the broad sense of that term given to it by Heidegger.
The question of Heidegger’s relation to whatever one might consider to be
 Being and Virtuousness 51

properly called “phenomenology” is a notoriously difficult one. Soon after

Being and Time, Heidegger stops calling what he is doing “phenomenology”;
only much later, in 1963, would he revisit his relation to phenomenology in a
short autobiographical essay. But his conclusion there shows that his thinking
regarding phenomenology never really changed,11 even if he ceased to find
the word useful: “in what is most its own phenomenology is not a school. It
is the possibility of thinking, . . . of corresponding to the claim of what is to
be thought” (Heidegger 2002b, 82). In the introduction to Being and Time,
Heidegger gives an account of his phenomenological method that appeals to the
Greek roots of the word “phenomenology”: to give the logos of the phenomenon
means “to let what shows itself be seen from itself, just as it shows itself from
itself ” (Heidegger 1996, 34)—but what he is concerned with is the very showing
itself: “the phenomenological concept of phenomenon, as self-showing, means
the being of beings” (35). In the lectures given shortly after Being and Time
and published as The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger justifies
giving what he is doing the Husserlian name “phenomenology” by saying
that he is trying to carry out a “reduction” analogous to the Husserlian ones:
“For us phenomenological reduction means leading phenomenological vision
back from the apprehension of a being, whatever may be the character of that
apprehension, to the understanding of the being of this being” (Heidegger
1988, 21). Heidegger insists in Being and Time that phenomenology is not one
“discipline” among others in philosophy, but that it is the very “procedure” of
philosophy itself (Heidegger 1996, 38). In Basic Problems, Heidegger says that
“what [phenomenology] seeks and aims at was already vigorously pursued in
Western philosophy from the very beginning” (Heidegger 1988, 21). This makes
it sound as if phenomenology is hardly anything in particular at all—doing
phenomenology is just doing philosophy. (Of course, given that the history of
philosophy is pervaded by what Heidegger calls the oblivion of being, such that
Heidegger will come to refuse the word “philosophy” for his own kind of thinking,
doing the most important kind of phenomenology—indeed, phenomenology
in the sense of the responding-opening of being—is not doing philosophy at all,
at least not as it has always been done.) Except: doing phenomenology is doing
philosophy as it ought to be done; doing phenomenology is doing philosophy
well—following the Republic’s stipulation that a virtue is what enables an activity
to go well, phenomenology is the virtue of philosophy.
It is one thing to say that phenomenology is the virtue of philosophy; it
seems to be quite another to suggest that it is a virtue full stop, conducive not
just to the good of philosophy but to the good itself. But if the good consists
52 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

in the responsive opening of being, then that is what phenomenology is. This
of course is not to say that virtuousness requires “doing phenomenology” in
the “disciplined” manner of self-conscious Heideggerian phenomenologists:
disciplined phenomenology is a technique that may aid in developing the
virtue of “everyday” phenomenology. On Heidegger’s terms, anyone can be a
phenomenologist, and presumably everyone is, to greater and lesser degrees.
“To let what shows itself be seen from itself, just as it shows itself,” and
specifically to let being as such show itself in its happening—which means to
acknowledge and mark the mysteriousness of its happening—is something that
anyone can do without ever having heard of Heidegger. However, we may be
blocked from engaging in this “everyday phenomenology” by our reception of
being as a matter of beings relating in some way to each other, whether as the
particles of a mechanistic material universe, the creatures of a creator God, etc.
Overcoming this blocked-ness is Heidegger’s chief concern in much of his work
after Being and Time. Insofar as this work helps us to become better “everyday
phenomenologists,” it helps us to become more virtuous.
It may still not be at all clear, though, why phenomenology is a virtue, let
alone the cardinal virtue, and not simply a virtuous activity, a good thing to
do. It seems to me that one can “be phenomenological” in a way that satisfies
even the robust conditions for being a virtue specified by Rosalind Hursthouse,
according to whom a virtue is a disposition that not only “‘goes all the way
down’, unlike a habit such as being a tea drinker,” but also is “multi-track,” in
that it involves not only the performance of the kind of actions that specify it
as the virtue it is—for example, the virtue of courage is not only a deep-seated
inclination to perform courageous actions—but “many other actions as well,
with emotions and emotional reactions, choices, values, desires, perceptions,
attitudes, interests, expectations and sensibilities” (Hursthouse 2012, §2).
To be phenomenological in this way means to be alive to the being of beings
throughout one’s life—perhaps not constantly, any more than the courageous
person is perfectly courageous, but distinctively so—and this means to be both
cognitively and affectively attentive and responsive to all the ways that being
presents itself. While this does not require being skilled in or even aware of
Heideggerian or any other kind of “disciplinary” phenomenology, these can
help one to be a better “everyday phenomenologist”.12
Finally, a word concerning the question whether it is necessary to “be
phenomenological” in order to be virtuous at all, and also whether “being
phenomenological” entails that one must possess all the other virtues, since both
 Being and Virtuousness 53

of these propositions may seem to be implied by the claim that phenomenology

is the cardinal virtue. Consider again Plato’s suggestion that wisdom is the
cardinal virtue. Sometimes, Plato does suggest that nothing is any good without
wisdom, as if only the wise could be genuinely courageous or just.13 The logic of
this suggestion is simple: the other virtues, or apparent virtues, are blind without
wisdom, since wisdom is responsible for knowledge of the good that makes the
other virtues virtues. Courage without wisdom may be mere boldness. But we
can also say that it is possible for one to be courageous without being wise, in
the sense of having knowledge of the good, though at the cost of uncertainty, as
without knowledge of the good one cannot know whether one is really being
courageous or just recklessly bold.
Similarly, consider whether wisdom in this sense entails complete
virtuousness: it would do so only if there is no such thing as akrasia, and to
know the good is to be motivated to achieve it. Of course, Plato himself offers a
variety of views on this issue, but as long as we take it to be the case that there
is no compelling argument for rejecting akrasia, there is a way for us to see
wisdom as the cardinal virtue without this entailing that the wise possess all
the other virtues: that is, wisdom is the virtue on which all the other virtues are
grounded, whether explicitly or not. Courage, to be the genuine virtue of courage,
must aim at what wisdom knows, whether the courageous person knows it or
not. In the same way, we can take it to be the case that phenomenology is the
cardinal virtue in that all other genuine virtues aim at what phenomenology
aims at, whether the possessors of those virtues have any explicit awareness of
this or not. Hence it is genuinely courageous to save someone from a burning
building, or to speak out against the oppression of others in one’s own society,
either on Plato’s terms or on mine, even if the person carry out these acts knows
nothing of the good—whatever that may be in Plato’s view, or considered as the
responding-opening of being on mine.

Virtue, happiness, and the good

In becoming more phenomenologically virtuous, we will become more happy,

in a certain way—the most important way. But not only is phenomenological
virtue the way to happiness, as virtue ethicists have traditionally held; the
kind of happiness associated with it is itself a virtuous state to be cultivated.
According to Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols, those moralists who say that
54 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

virtue is the way to happiness have got things backward: virtue is the effect
of happiness, Nietzsche says, not the other way around (Nietzsche 1968, 493).
On its face, Plato is among the most obvious targets of this assertion. In the
Republic, Socrates’s nominal task is to show that just people are happy because
they are just. But Nietzsche’s view seems closer to his when he says that the happy
person “carries the order, which he represents physiologically, into his relations
with other human beings and things.” By Book 4 of the Republic, Socrates has
arrived at the view that the virtue of justice is fundamentally a matter of the
soul’s being well-ordered, and Book 4 concludes with an agreement that it is
absurd to suppose that a well-ordered soul is anything but happy. This is the
best argument (and perhaps the only real argument) that any of the ancient
“eudaimonists” had for the claim that virtue is the way to happiness. The soul
is just, Socrates says, when it is ruled by the reasoning part; the “harmony” of
a well-ordered soul, consisting in the agreement of the other parts that reason
should rule, Socrates calls sophrosunē (“moderation” or “temperance”). The
view he proposes is not really that justice results in eudaimonia; it is that the just
soul and the eudaimōn soul are the same thing.
However, this argument for the identity of the eudaimōn and virtuous souls
is untenable on the Republic’s own terms, because it relies on the assumption
that there is always one good thing to do, and reason, apprehending the good,
knows what it is. This assumption fails (even assuming that reason apprehends
the good as a matter of course) because the dialectical pursuit of the good
leads reason this way and that, without end, like a Socratic dialogue.14 The real
basis of the reason-ruled soul’s happiness lies in its engagement with the forms
in its dialectical pursuit of the good: Socrates says that the greatest pleasure
possible for a human soul consists in the fitting-together of its rational part
with that which is most being, that is, a form (Republic, 585b-e). With this
idea I think that Plato provides what he himself might call an “image” of
something of which Heidegger helps us toward the thing itself: on my view,
Plato is right that the greatest human happiness consists in our fitting-together
with being, but again his account needs to be modified, for my purposes, to
take the ontological difference between being and beings into account. To see
precisely how this must be done, I will turn to the role that affective states play
for Heidegger’s thinking of being.
For the early Heidegger, the importance of the “fundamental attunement” of
Angst is that an analysis of it reveals the essential temporality of our reception
of being.15 The later Heidegger does not speak of the role of affective states
in attuning us to the happening of being. In the Contributions to Philosophy,
 Being and Virtuousness 55

composed in the mid-1930s, Heidegger speaks of “startled dismay” as attuning

us to the abandonment of being. In the 1955 lectures published as What is
Philosophy?, he speaks of different moods as attuning the reception of being in
different ways in different epochs of the history of being—wonder for the ancient
Greeks, doubt for the modern Cartesians. Given that the later Heidegger comes
to see the project of Being and Time as having failed to escape from the history
of metaphysical responses to being to which the ancient Greeks and modern
Cartesians belong, we might suppose that, for the later Heidegger, the attempt to
“think being” through attending to some affective state of ours is a metaphysical
dead end. Whether or not Heidegger himself thought so, I think this is mistaken.
There are certain affective states in which the very happening of being, which
Heidegger begins to speak of with the word Ereignis in the 1930s and which
is his main object from that time on, is particularly striking and available for
us to respond to as such. One such mood is what I call deep happiness.16 Deep
happiness is different from happiness as conceived in the major theories of
happiness, both modern and ancient: it is not essentially defined by desire- or
preference-satisfaction, or by pleasure, or by success in achieving goals, or by
satisfaction with one’s life on the whole, although it may be associated with
all of these things. It bears little superficial resemblance to the ancient and
Hellenistic conceptions of eudaimonia, but it does speak to the etymological
basis of eudaimonia: to be eudaimōn is literally to have a good daimōn, and as
Plato has Socrates say in the Symposium, a daimōn is that which connects the
human with the divine (Symposium, 202e). To be eudaimōn, then, is to have a
good connection with the divine. Like Heidegger, when he speaks in terms of
“the fourfold,”17 I think of “the divine” as standing for the inexplicable mystery
of being’s happening to us. What I think of as “deep happiness” includes the
kinds of states that might (nontechnically) be called “transcendent,” “drawing us
out of ourselves” in a fitting-together with being of such insistence that we are
compelled to somehow recognize its happening, paradigmatically exemplified
in connections with nature, other human beings, and artworks.18 Because states
of deep happiness are states in which we are most attuned to the happening of
being and most able to engage in the phenomenological responding-opening of
being, we are called upon to cultivate our ability to experience such states.
Since Being and Time has no ethical program, and in fact warns against
being read as if it does (Heidegger 1996, 176), it provides no warrant for people
generally to cultivate experiences of Angst. Such experiences are important for
the philosopher who is concerned to understand the meaning of being, but
understanding the meaning of being is not something that everyone ought to
56 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

do. Even for the Heideggerian philosopher, cultivating Angst is not necessary;
all that is necessary is to recognize how central to human existence Angst is,
and to understand the significance of this fact in terms of its revealing being’s
temporality. The concern of the early Heidegger is the oblivion of the question
of the meaning of being—it is a philosophical oblivion that is at issue. Shortly
after Being and Time, and for the rest of his career, Heidegger’s concern shifts to
the oblivion, or abandonment, of being itself. After this shift, it is important on
Heidegger’s terms for people generally, not just philosophers, to overcome that
oblivion. For the early Heidegger, whose goal is the theoretical understanding
of being (i.e., to make explicit in concepts the preontological understanding,
which everyone has, of the meaning of being as temporality), Angst is something
you only really ought to have experienced as such if you are a philosopher, and
even in that case, you may need to have experienced it only once. On my later-
Heideggerian view, for which the goal is as expansive as possible a responsive
opening of being, deep happiness is something that everyone ought to
experience as much as possible—your capacity for deep happiness is something
you ought to cultivate, if you can. You want to make a habit of being in states of
deep happiness, and of doing the phenomenological work, responding to them
appropriately so that they do not slip away unmarked, that enhances them while
we are in them and, allowing us to understand them, helps us to find our way
back to them while we are not in them.
It is possible, of course, to be deeply happy, attuned to the happening of being,
without engaging in anything that we would normally call phenomenology.
In fact, we might expect that the phenomenological attempt to conceptualize
the happening of being in the moment of deep happiness would disrupt the
moment, because doing so would involve taking a step back from it in order to
observe it and report on it. In my experience, however, this is not necessarily
the case. As Heidegger suggests, thinking does not need to represent things
set against the thinking subject as objects; phenomenological thinking, like
poetic saying, gives an original presentation of them.19 This is the significance
of Heidegger’s insistence on the formulation “thinking being” rather than
“thinking about being.” Moreover, in a way, it is not only not necessarily the
case that thinking “gets in the way” of deep happiness; it is necessarily not the
case. Deep happiness is not “bliss”—it involves conscious, reflective witnessing.
Of course, doing this does not require thinking with Heidegger’s concepts. All
that it requires is that one in some way marks the mysterious fact that one is
experiencing the happening of the being of some being. The more one is aware
 Being and Virtuousness 57

of the circumstances under which these experiences are possible, and the ways
in which they are blocked from occurring, the more one will be able, through
one’s deep happiness, to allow for the responding-opening of being.
Deep happiness is not the only affective state that attunes us to the happening
of being; it seems that negative ones like Sartre’s “nausea,” as well as pain, also
do so. But because we flee from these negative states, they block us from further
responding-opening of being. Deep happiness, on the other hand, is something
we crave more and more of. As Aristotle maintains, the way to cultivate
virtues—the way to turn mere right actions into full-fledged habitual virtues—
is to associate them with pleasure (Nicomachean Ethics, 1172a). The virtuous
activity of phenomenology results in more deep happiness for us, which not only
provides the occasion but makes us hunger for more phenomenology.

Conclusion

I could not hope in the space of this paper to have made convincing cases for
each part of the Platonic-Heideggerian virtue ethics I have sketched. All I can
hope for is to have shown that a promising virtue ethics can be developed on
the basis of insights from the thinking of Plato and Heidegger. If the two basic
ideas of my view—namely, that the importance of human existence is due to
our capacity for fulfilling the happening of being, and that the good consists in
our responding-opening of being—are at all plausible, then the way has been
shown at least to the possible recovery of the philosophical project of saying
what the good is. If that project is abandoned, then any virtue ethics is ultimately
empty. Virtues are virtues insofar as they are conducive to the good. If there is
ultimately no good, then there are ultimately no virtues. If the good consists in
our responding-opening of being, then phenomenology is the cardinal virtue,
and the pursuit of deep happiness and the virtuous pursuit of the good are one
and the same.

Notes

I wish to thank an anonymous reviewer for the annual meeting of the Society for
Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, and my commentator
there, Jo-Jo Koo, for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.
58 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

1 I do not mean to say that this virtue ethics would be endorsed by either Plato or
Heidegger, or that my reading of these figures may not—as Foucault says of his
reading of Nietzsche—“make them groan,” or at least appear to do so. While I do
believe that my reading of each is correct and not distorting, my aim here is not
exegetical but constructive.
2 So Plato has Socrates say in Republic 6 that “it’s by their relation to [the form of the
good] that just things and the others become useful and beneficial”, that is, that
they become virtues (Republic, 505a).
References to Plato in this essay are to the texts as they appear in:
Plato. 1924. Laches, Protagoras, Meno, Euthydemus, trans. W. R. M. Lamb.
Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press.
—. 1989. Symposium, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis:
Hackett.
—. 1992. Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube, revised by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis:
Hackett.
3 I argue for this interpretation of Republic, 533 in an unpublished paper.
4 In asking for an account of dialectic, Glaucon asks Socrates how to get to the
resting place at the end of the philosophical road. But there is no such resting
place.
5 For an elaboration of what I mean by “the happening of being,” see King 2009,
35–41.
6 The view I am developing can be seen as basically anti-Nietzschean in that it
is opposed to Nietzsche’s thought that “value” is a product (whether produced
self-consciously or not) of evaluation. Of course, Nietzsche’s thought is widely
accepted today, despite the fact that it makes it impossible to give a noncircular
ultimate answer to any question concerning why we ought to take anything to be
good or bad except that we can’t help it—for example, we can’t help, due to our
constitution as the kind of creatures we are, taking pain and suffering to be bad.
But the fact is that, due to our constitution as free creatures, we can help it. Some
of us can enjoy pain, and we can at least ask the question why it is bad to suffer,
and once we’ve asked the question and refused to accept the self-evident badness
of suffering, we stand in need of an answer.
7 Wherever I say “human beings” I mean human beings or beings like us, that is,
beings with capacities to receive and respond to the happening of being.
8 See, for example, Heidegger 1998, 148; Heidegger 1998, 236; Heidegger 2002a,
31/96.
9 See, for example, Sheehan 1988, 41.
10 This is probably the kernel of a response to Levinas’s objection that Heidegger
“subordinate[s] the relation with someone, who is an existent, (the ethical relation)
to a relation with the Being of existents” (Levinas 1969, 45). The response would be
 Being and Virtuousness 59

along the lines that what Levinas charges is true—for Heidegger, ontology is prior
to “ethics” in the interpersonal sense, though, as Heidegger indicates in the “Letter
on ‘Humanism’,” on his view there is no difference between fundamental ontology
and what might be called “fundamental ethics”—but beside the most important
point, because a Heideggerian ethic provides a ground for the ethical response to
the other which Levinas takes to be basic.
11 This is confirmed in a brief note he adds to the essay in 1969.
12 The best reason I have for making this claim is that it has been true in my own
case (although I still have a long way to go).
13 See, for example, Euthydemus, 281b–e.
14 That Glaucon thinks it absurd to suppose that a soul divided against itself can be
eudaimōn shows his unfamiliarity with the eudaimonia of the philosopher.
15 In the 1929–30 lectures published as The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics,
Heidegger talks about how boredom can play the same role as Angst and suggests
that at the present boring time, boredom may play it best. But it seems that
an analysis of any affective state that is essentially temporal would do—eager
anticipation, for instance, or nostalgia. Note that if Heidegger were right that
temporality is the meaning of being in general, then all affective states would be
equally essentially, if not equally obviously, temporal.
16 This concept is elaborated in King (2009).
17 See, for example, the lectures “The Thing” and “Building Dwelling Thinking” in
Heidegger (1975).
18 King (2009) is grounded in descriptions of such states.
19 See, for instance, Heidegger 1975, 156–7. Cf. Mallin (1979) on the “cognitive-
linguistic region” as one of the four sites of our apprehension of being in Merleau-
Ponty’s thinking.
 4

Horizon Intentionality and

Aristotelian Friendship
Eric Chelstrom

Aristotle famously argues that friendship consists in reciprocated goodwill

between two persons; “the parties must have good will towards each other,
i.e. wish good things for each other, and be aware of each other’s doing so”
(Nicomachean Ethics, 1156a3–4).1 He argues that there are three distinct types
of friendship: friendships of utility, friendships of pleasure, and complete
friendships (§ VIII.3). Each type of friendship is grounded on a type of love—
what the principal object of one’s affection is—and represents a distinct way to
be in community with another. Friendships of utility and pleasure are based
on affection for some benefit or pleasure received by means of being with the
other; if that condition is removed, the grounds for the relation dissolve. The
complete friendship, by contrast, is predicated on the love for the person, not
something derived from the person’s company. The complete friendship is only
possible between virtuous persons: “It is the friendship between good people,
those resembling each other in excellence, that is complete; for each alike of
these wishes good things for the other in so far as he is good, and he is good in
himself ” (1156b7–10). Each party to a complete friendship must be virtuous
and share to a significant degree character traits with the other and possess self-
love (§§ VIII.3, VIII.5, IX.4–6, IX.8). The reason being that these are said to be
conditions for the possibility of love for the other person, in distinction from the
love for something associated with the person.
Aristotle asserts the following about complete friendships:

It is to be expected that such friendships should be rare, since there are few
such people. Further, such friendship also requires time for the parties to grow
acquainted with each other’s character; for as the proverb has it, people cannot
 Horizon Intentionality and Aristotelian Friendship 61

have got to know each other before they have savored all that salt together, nor
indeed can they have accepted each other or be friends before each party is seen to
be loveable, and is trusted, by the other. (Nicomachean Ethics, 1156b25–9)

Time is necessary for complete friendships. One reason is that individuals must
come to appreciate one another and gain one another’s trust. However, given
that other types of friendship can last indefinite amounts of time, there is a
puzzle as to what time adds in the case of the complete friendship or how it
differs from other kinds of friendships. Presumably, other types of friendship
also consist in some measure of trust. How does time give rise to the relevant
form of trust?
I argue that Edmund Husserl’s concept of horizon intentionality can inform
and enrich Aristotle’s theory of friendship. An analysis of horizon intentionality
offers concrete insight into the nature of the qualitative difference between
complete friendships and the other types of friendship. With time, a difference
arises in the intentional horizons manifest in each individual’s experience of
the other and about their friendship that is unique to complete friendships and
does not happen in virtue of time alone. Getting to know another, to develop
love for the person herself, to be able to have trust in the person herself, require
developed intentional horizons, a modification from general empathy to
individually informed empathy.
In establishing my position, I rely upon not only Husserl, but also on Alfred
Schütz. Consideration of Schütz, tempered by appreciation of other early
phenomenologists, helps to establish more firmly Husserlian phenomenology’s
perennially underappreciated capacity for addressing social phenomena.2
This chapter first introduces the concept of horizon intentionality. Following
that, an account of how horizon intentionality plays a role in Aristotelian
friendships is given, addressing how that account informs the necessary
conditions of time, trust in the other, and self-love in Aristotle’s theory of
friendship.

Horizon intentionality

The concern for horizon intentionality in Husserl appears in relation to

discussions of evidence. It arises, arguably, as a consequence of the recognition
that the object of experience is not exhaustively understood in relation to that
which immediately presents itself at a moment of time. The notion of horizon
62 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

is introduced as Husserl examines evidence relating to appresentational

characteristics of experience. Appresented contents are coconstitutive of
experience, they “fill out” the objects and relations in experience. While there
are many forms of horizon intentionality (e.g., the bodily dimension) for the
present purposes, I focus on three of the more straightforward kinds of horizons:
(a) internal, (b) external, and (c) temporal. These three kinds of horizons are
implicit in Sections 19–20 of Cartesian Meditations. They are also discussed in
Ideas I and further developed in the posthumously published Experience and
Judgment.

a. Internal horizons
First, an introduction to the general meaning of horizon. In Section 19 of
Cartesian Meditations, Husserl asserts: “Every subjective process has a process
‘horizon’ . . . an intentional horizon of reference to potentialities of consciousness
that belong to the process itself ” (Husserl 1999, 44; Hua I, 82). He gives an
example of an object of perception. Every object of perception is more than
merely that which is immediately perceived. The experience of an object as
an object of its kind includes more or less definite expectations regarding the
profiles of that object that are currently unavailable—for example, its other side
is similar to the present profile in coloration, style, shape. One has different
expectations where one’s experience is of a house in comparison with a house-
façade, or where one experiences a statue of a person in contrast with a person.
One does not just experience the profiles of the house as disjointed, but one’s
experience of the profile of the house, where one experiences it as a house, is
filled out by one’s expectations as to what the unavailable profiles might be
like. With a statue one does not expect the possibility of movement, thought or
responsiveness to one’s greetings, but with a person one does. “The perception
has horizons made up of other possibilities of perception, as perceptions that we
could have, if we actively directed the course of perception otherwise” (Husserl
1999, 44; Hua I, 82). What’s more, “the horizons are ‘predelineated’ potentialities,”
their potentialities are neither arbitrary nor constructed (Husserl 1999, 45;
Hua I, 82). It is the incompletely determined nature of phenomena that they
always are more than what one immediately attends to of them or in relation
to them. The possibilities of intentional fulfillment, of coming to evidence for
what is intended, are open, but themselves not without determination. Rather,
the conditions for intentional fulfillment of horizons experienced in relation
 Horizon Intentionality and Aristotelian Friendship 63

to some phenomena are preestablished in relation to that phenomena’s type.

The potentialities manifest in intentional horizons are always capable of being
explicated or “uncovered.”
Horizon intentionalities have a determinate form, even if their contents are
indeterminate; “its indeterminateness, it has a determinate structure” (Husserl
1999, 45; Hua I, 83). This is because the possibilities are associated with the
specific phenomenon.3 Husserl’s example is that of a die. As a die, there is a
determinate set of possibilities associated with it and with each roll one makes.
The outcome of any given roll of a die is undetermined. That open-ended,
indeterminate set of possibilities constitutes a horizon of the die. One generally
expects a die to be fair and not weighted, to have a one-in-six chance of any given
face being rolled. Those expectations are associated with the type of thing one
finds oneself to be experiencing. The numbers of the die are expected to be one
through six, opposing sides to add to a sum of seven, the numbers represented
by means of the familiar dot configurations, all faces of the die having the same
coloration, and so on.
Horizons account for that which is undetermined in immediate experience,
manifesting as the variant possibilities associated with what is experienced. As
David Vessey puts it, horizons “demarcate what can be directly sensed from what
cannot be directly sensed, but they do not limit the perception of the object to
what can be directly sensed” (Vessey 2009, 535). Also, “The horizons are what
make it possible to perceive more than what is directly sensed. Horizons open
up possibilities of future perceptions of the object and in doing so provide it with
its character” (535–6). Horizons are part of experience, not something added to
it. Husserl goes further:

Thus, as consciousness of something, every consciousness has the essential

property, not just of being somehow able to change into continually new modes
of consciousness of the same object (which, throughout the unity of synthesis,
is inherent in them as an identical objective sense), but of being able to do so
according to—indeed, only according to those horizon intentionalities. (Husserl
1999, 45; Hua I, 83)

The very possibility of an object’s being identified as an object of a given kind,

to be differentiated from everything else in the field of experience, requires that
there be intentional horizons. As an object, it must have the possibility of being
set apart from everything else, of being individuated, having a set of possibilities
distinctive to itself. What is possible depends on what it is, what types of relations
64 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

it stands in, and so on. To experience something as something of a certain kind

or type is to experience the type’s characteristic possibilities in relation to the
particular object. Part of experiencing something as being of a type, no matter
how general or unspecific a type, is experiencing a set of possibilities distinct
from phenomena not of that type.
Every intentional analysis (i.e. every analysis of the structures of intentionality
manifest in experience), in order to be complete, must involve “an uncovering
of the potentialities ‘implicit’ in actualities of consciousness” (Husserl 1999, 46;
Hua I, 83). A straightforward implication of this is that any object constituted
in and through intentional achievements should be analyzed in reference to its
horizon structures of those achievements, not just its physical characteristics.
Social phenomena are paradigmatic. Being constituted through collective
intentional achievements, they require analyses of horizon intentionalities
for any complete analyses of the phenomena themselves.4 Friendships are
dependent on the intentional achievements of pairings of subjects, those
intentional achievements constitute the friendship and are grounded in the
lived experiences of those individuals. One loves the other, intends goodwill
on the other’s behalf, and recognizes the reciprocation thereof. As such, an
examination of how their horizon intentional structures differ ought to be
informative in distinguishing the possibilities associated with time and trust
in the case of complete friendships from their manifestation in other types of
friendships.
Vessey describes internal horizons as “horizons that arise from the nature
of the object either as an object, such as taking up space, or as the kind of
object that it is. When we see someone from the back, we perceive him or her
as having a face. It belongs to the internal horizon of a head to have a face”
(Vessey 2009, 534). In Husserl’s words: “Every experience of a particular thing
has its internal horizon . . .” (Husserl 1973, 32). An internal horizon manifests
from one’s identification of something as being of a certain type. The evidentiary
fulfillment of that type-attribution, whether or not one is correct, is a separate
matter. For example, the internal horizon of a person is distinct from that
of a statue. A statue is not expected to be able to move or think. Hence the
surprise when the street performer posing as a statue grabs one’s shoulder, as
the precedent horizon is “shattered.” One experiences the failure of evidence in
relation to what type of object one had taken the object to be. Further, the object
of experience’s identified type is displaced by another in virtue of this disruption
of one’s intentional horizon.
 Horizon Intentionality and Aristotelian Friendship 65

b. External horizons
While internal horizons are object-based, external horizons are grounded
in object-relations. Where, for example, one identifies a thing as an apple, to
place that apple in any sort of relationship is something over and above its bare
“appleness.” While each object of experience has its own internal horizon, when
placed in relation to one another, there emerges another horizon—anticipations
and potentialities grounded in relations. “Everything given in experience has
not only an internal horizon but also an infinite, open, external horizon of objects
cogiven (therefore, a horizon of the second level, reference to the horizon of the
first level and implying it)” (Husserl 1973, 33). External horizons depend on
internal horizons, the possibilities for apple-relation depend on appleness, and
so on in like manner. As Vessey puts it:

External horizons are horizons established by the relation between the object
and its surroundings. If there is a telegraph pole partially obstructing our view
of a house, we recognize the parts of the house on both sides of the pole as still
belonging to the same house as being located behind the pole. . . . All relations get
their character from the external horizon, including the relation of belonging to
one spatio-temporal whole with everything else. (Vessey 2009, 534–5)

c. Temporal horizons
All experience is temporally extended; all real things “are known as existing
within the one spatiotemporal horizon,” that of the world as experienced
(Husserl 1973, 33). “For Husserl, the temporal horizon is the most important
as all objects appear to us as temporal objects, as extended in time just as they
are in space” (Vessey 2009, 535). The reason for the centrality of temporal
horizons is based in the temporal structure of consciousness itself as well as how
potentialities or anticipatory projections point beyond the immediate temporal
moment:
To every perception there always belongs a horizon of the past, as a potentiality of
awakenable recollections; and to every recollection there belongs, as a horizon, the
continuous intervening intentionality of possible recollections (to be actualized
on my initiative, actively), up to the actual Now of perception. (Husserl 1999,
44–5; Hua I, 82)

Objects are experienced as having temporal extension and one cannot make
sense of an object’s having potentiality without time, and that also assumes
66 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

some identity over time as well as the possibility of the object’s undergoing some
change of state or modality.
While temporal horizons are important, as time is essential to consciousness,
leaving it as Vessey states it is ambiguous. Temporal horizons are ontologically
fundamental, insofar as they serve as a necessary condition for all other
horizon intentionalities. There could be no projection or appresentational
content beyond the “Now” were this not the case. Without that there are no
individuated objects, relations, events, or states of affairs. However, temporal
horizons are themselves dependent on both internal and external horizons for
content. Temporal horizons have no content proper to them as such. Instead,
they establish the formal possibility for other horizons. Even if temporality is
constitutive of consciousness, temporality itself is without content and content
too is necessary for consciousness.

d. The three horizons at work

Consider the experience of an apple on a countertop, as an example to draw out
the horizon structures manifest in experience. First, insofar as one identifies the
object as an apple, one already includes potentialities of that type. An apple can
be firm to malleable, sweet or sour tasting, edible, and so on. Those potentialities
are parts of the experience of the apple itself, the internal horizon of apple
qua intentional object. But this is not what one experiences; one experiences
the apple as being on the countertop. As an object, it has spatial dimension,
extending beyond the immediately given presentational profile. The apple stands
in relation to the countertop. One does not believe that the section of countertop
which is currently obstructed from view by the apple is not there, rather one
experiences the apple’s relation to the countertop as involving an obstruction
of view within the given perceptual profile. Exercising yet another potentiality
constitutive of one’s experience, should one walk around to the other side of the
countertop, some of the initially obstructed region of the countertop now comes
into view, as other regions of countertop fall away from view. Similarly, picking
up the apple will reveal more of the apple and the countertop. The apple, in
distinguishing itself as other than the countertop, should be able to be removed
from it, pointing already to a history of this relation. (Consider one’s surprise at
being unable to remove the glued coin of the prankster.) In none of this does one
first experience countertop parts or apple parts—such things are abstractions,
involving a willful redirection of attention and act of judgment acting on the
primary experience.
 Horizon Intentionality and Aristotelian Friendship 67

The apple can also be brought into relation with other things: a peeler, a knife,
one’s hand, one’s mouth, and so on. Those possibilities, all of which depend on
the apple’s presence but none of which are determinable in regard to just its
presenting a given apple profile, are manifest elements in the external horizons
of the experience. Those external horizons, external in relation to the apple,
involve possible states of affairs that the apple might be made to participate in.
While I emphasize futural possibilities, possibilities regarding the apple’s past
are also at work in experience, for example, that the apple was placed on the
countertop by one’s spouse or that it was grown locally. One might wash the
apple, because one experiences it as having a history wherein it was sprayed
with insecticide while maturing on the tree. Finally, apples have histories unto
themselves, as they are objects extended through time. That the apple is the
product of successful germination on an apple tree and that it will eventually
rot, if left on the countertop too long, are both senses relying on its temporal
horizons.
One must distinguish between an experience of an object as an object of
some sort and one’s experience of an object as being an instance of a particular
type, with its correlative range of associated possibilities. Consider an example
like the Coke bottle in the film The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980). To one who has
never experienced a Coke bottle or anything like it, it is not, strictly speaking,
a Coke bottle at all. Nonetheless, it is an object of an unspecified type. Even as
an object of an indeterminate sort, however, the object is experienced as having
certain potentialities—associated with its apparent material, its figure, and so
forth. One sees in the film how those experiencing this new object attempt
to discern its range of possibilities and to categorize it into a type. This points
to the importance of both genetic phenomenology and the role of types in
experience.
Husserl introduces discussion of typification in association with horizons.
Of individual real things “these each have their own a priori, a group of types
[Typik] in view of which they are necessarily anticipated and which, through
every fulfillment by specific possibilities of this realm, remain invariant”
(Husserl 1973, 36). Types are operative in everyday experience. As an individual
experiences something as something, the something that is experienced includes
horizons appropriate to that something (38). Take, for example, Husserl’s famous
case of mistaking a waxen figure for a woman (Husserl 1970, 137–8; Hua XIX/I,
458–9). When Husserl first experiences the statue as a person, his experience
is of a living, animate being, with a conscious life of her own, as well as having
a sexual identity and gender. His experience includes and is informed by the
68 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

potentialities and characteristics associated with encountering a being of that

kind. Those anticipatory projections, operative in the horizons of experience,
continue affecting one’s experience until one is presented with disconfirmation
of what one has intended. The projections and expectations continue until the
truth of the waxen figure is revealed, and the preceding sense is “shattered,”
when a new set of horizons displaces the previous one. The case of a street
performer who fools one into thinking she is a statue works in the reverse order
of horizonal expectations.
Typification is part of how consciousness orders its horizons in lived
experience. That fact is important in grounding the possibility for collective
intentional achievements. Collectively we constitute certain social objects and
institutions, and the powers social kinds present, through shared horizonal
anticipations. This is not an endorsement of relativism, as the types themselves
are given through experience and are open to being evidentially fulfilled or empty.
Differences in experiences and what they refer to when capable of evidence are
what underlay type distinctions. The distinctions are not arbitrary nor merely
up to the caprice of an individual, even if informed by an individual’s history,
a history that is always heavily influenced and informed by one’s pre-given
social context. Hence the importance of one’s social context, especially of one’s
upbringing, and how that informs one’s sense of virtue in Aristotle. Rather than
relativism, it is to assert the grounding role of subjectivity in relation to social
phenomena. Experience and actions require subjects; a subject is necessary for
there to be any experience or action whatsoever. That does not mean that subjects
determine or decide their experiences or the full factual nature of their action,
only that they are necessary to have any such thing at all. As Schütz argues, the
role of the individual in interpreting the meaning of something—even if merely
in a manner complicit with existing social norms—is essential.

The horizons of friendship

Turning to the case of friendships, while some quantity of time is essential to

the development of complete friendships, it is not clear that quantity of time
simpliciter is the reason for time’s importance. The other forms of friendships
can also last over indefinite periods of time. The basic projection into the
future of their continuance, as well as memorial grounds to strengthen futural
expectation, seems to be consistent across all three forms of friendship. What
does time add in the case of complete friendships that is not present in the
 Horizon Intentionality and Aristotelian Friendship 69

case of the others? When Aristotle argues that time is a necessary condition for
the development of complete friendships, it seems reasonable to take him to be
asserting that time’s role is qualitatively different in complete friendship than
in other sorts of friendship. However, the temporal horizon does not seem to
be clearly distinctive. If one accepts that temporal horizons are dependent on
external and internal horizons for their content, it would stand to reason that the
difference originates at one of these levels of horizon intentionality.
Is the uniqueness of complete friendships found in external or internal
horizons? One could argue, since friendship is a relation and external horizons
are of the potentialities inherent in relations, that the ground of a friendship is
to be identified in external horizons. The friendship relation is what one is after
here. In all three cases, as friendships, the external horizons are important. In all
three cases, it is the relation between one individual and another that is central.
One could argue that there is something distinctive about the relation itself in
the case of complete friendships.
But this is not informative, nor does the reasoning hold. Naturally, there is
a difference between complete friendships and other kinds of friendships, and
since friendships are types of relations, that would suggest there is a difference
in the relations. But that does not tell one what the difference is or why it is
the case. Second, simply because friendships are relational, it does not follow
that the ground for all friendships is found in external horizons. Recall that
external horizons are dependent on internal horizons of those objects brought
into relation in experience. Recall also that Aristotle differentiates types of
friendships on the basis of what the primary object of love is in each case. This
suggests that friendships are distinctive relations because of some feature or
characteristic of their objects, the relata. The nature of the relation emerges from
the nature of what is recognized as loveable about the other and from the mutual
recognition of that state of affairs. As such, I argue, the source of complete
friendship’s nature originates with a qualitative modification in the internal
horizons; its essence is based in one’s comportment to the other. To recognize
the other for who the other is, and to wish the other well for that reason, takes
time in a way that identifying another’s usefulness or being pleasant does not.
Further, once the modification of the internal horizon is clarified, one can show
how the qualitative distinction tracks through the other horizon intentionalities
associated with the experiences of the individuals.
In any instance of one’s relation to another, the other must be recognized
as other. How a specific other stands in relation to oneself involves further
judgment. We recognize that others play distinctive roles in our lives. Each
70 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

role includes a value assessment associated with it. In the case of friendships,
that assessment identifies the ground of the friendship—being pleasing to be
around, being a professional colleague, and so on. Relating to others through
the mediation of roles emphasizes the relation. Such an emphasis does not
require a robust sense of the internal horizon associated with the other as
a person. The experience of the other is informed over time, its valuation
enhanced and harmoniously confirmed. The value assessment of the other’s
merit is not itself the relationship, but its realization and mutual recognition
constitute essential moments of the relation. The valuation is a condition of the
friendship’s being. This is not a question of moral worth, but of what specific
meaning the other has in one’s life.
One could always stand in a given value-infused relation with another, and
for any length of time, without any requirement that one’s relation be a complete
friendship. All three types of friendship involve a value-predicated ground, so it
is not having a valuation alone that is sufficient. That does not inform Aristotle’s
claim about the necessity of time. Two individuals might have mutual goodwill
toward one another for any number of years, have similar characters and values,
and still not be friends in the sense of a complete friendship. They might trust
one another to a point, take pleasure in the company of one another, and still
not enter into a complete friendship. This is because time and relation alone do
not generate the type of familiarity with the other that is necessary for complete
friendship.

a. Internal horizons and complete friendships

It is precisely that the relation is one in which personal narratives entwine
in a manner where both parties act together to shape their shared narrative.
To achieve that end, it is necessary to develop familiarity with the person
herself. If that is the case, it is the internal horizon associated with the other
that distinguishes the complete friendship and accounts for its temporal
requirement. It takes time to get to know another as the person he or she is,
and not just the other’s skills, attributes, or goods. One shares one’s life with
the other. In other forms of friendship, the other, as a person with a unique
biography, could always remain nearly opaque to one. This cannot be the case
with complete friendships, being predicated on a relation grounded on one’s
affection for the character of the other.
The reason time is essential to complete friendship is that two individuals
must not only show goodwill to one another and have similarities in
 Horizon Intentionality and Aristotelian Friendship 71

character, they must also get to know each other’s persons. It’s not that they
must become transparent to one another, as that’s impossible, but the internal
horizons they associate with one another in experience must be robust.
Further, it’s not just knowledge of the other’s beliefs or dispositions in an
abstract sense, but as part of the lived experience of the other, constitutive of
how and who the other is. It is knowing the other for who, not what, the other
is that is key. There should be a plentiful stock of harmoniously congruent
appresentational profiles of the other gathered in experience; supported by
evidential continuity, continuously reinforcing each friend’s sense of the
other, of who and how the person is. That developed sense of an internal
horizon, which is not essential in the other types of friendships—as they are
about the individual in some manner other than personhood—grounds the
key differences manifest through the other layers of horizon intentionality as
well. Externally and temporally, the character of the relation becomes distinct
from the other forms in virtue of the requirement of well-informed internal
horizon of this other as the individual he or she is.
It is this familiar sense of the other as a basis for extended trust in the continuity
of the other’s character and actions that confidence scams rely on. Confidence
scams succeed when they offer the semblance of appresentational consistency
and continuity suggestive of a genuine and forthright personal interaction. As
such, one is lead into developing a “profile” of the other that engenders trust.
On the basis of a consistently generated semblance of trustworthiness, the
successful confidence artist is able to gain the other’s trust in order to violate it.
It is a matter of developing the relation as an asset to one’s actions.
One might object that even recognizing the other as other always involves
some form of valuation. After all, there are historical cases where certain groups
are not given moral or legal recognition. To recognize one as other is, one might
argue, to ascribe a moral status to the other. This line of argument involves a
separate issue. In the case of friendships, one is focused on giving articulation to
distinct forms of social relations. In the case of the primary recognition of the
other, one is concerned with the bare recognition of another subject. Developing
a sense of how one understands one’s relation to the other is something over
and above that more basic constitution. In no way am I marginalizing the
importance of recognition, I am merely expressing that it is more fundamental
as a form of intentional relation to another, and, as such, something that would
be presupposed in any friendship. There is no friendship without recognition.
To intend another as friend, one has already recognized that person not only
as a potential friend but also as a subject worthy of recognition. The racist will
72 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

not accept certain others as candidates for friendship, not even as persons or
human beings in some cases. Those forms of recognition are constituted prior
to friendship.

b. Schütz: Horizons, typification, and social forms

Schütz’s work affords further insight into why the internal horizon
intentionality of the complete friendship, as a type of social relation, is key
to understanding its nature. Schütz argues the importance of typification in
intersubjective experience, and how that relates to biography. For Schütz,
the “subjective interpretation of meaning” is an essential feature of one’s
experience generally, but most importantly is essential to experiences of
social phenomena including what one more recently refers to as collective
intentional phenomena. Regarding Schütz’s view, Gurwitsch argues, the
“subjective interpretation of meaning” (subjecktiver or gemeinter Sinn) is not
peculiar to analysis, but “proves to be a common practice of social life in the
world of everyday experience” (Gurwitsch 1962, 68). All social interaction is
based on expectations guided by typifications functioning anonymously. That
is to say, one has expectations that norms associated with roles will be more
or less fulfilled by the relevant role-playing others. The social world can only
have sense to it if it has a sufficiently stable structure of anticipations. “Unless
I had such an idea, it would be impossible for me to come to terms with [the
other], to interlock my course of action with what I may expect his to be; there
would be nothing to orient and guide me in the negotiations on which I am
about to enter” (67). Schütz argues that this sort of reciprocity is a requirement
for all social interactions. One may thus consider what roles and expectations
manifest in the variant forms of friendship. The other in friendships of utility
and pleasure is one who fills the role dictated by the specific ground of that
relation. The complete friendship’s role, on the other hand, emerges relative
to the individual person. In complete friendships, the person establishes and
determines the role; in other forms of friendships, the role determines whether
and to what extent the person fits. Where most roles are anonymous, complete
friendships are tied to specific individuals. Only one individual can fulfill
that role, as it is fitted to the individual’s person. Friends of this sort are not
interchangeable like people associated with other social relations.
One’s type-forms and expectations are informed by and influenced by one’s
social context, in particular through one’s use of language. In this way, cultural
context informs one’s experiences. One’s inherited expectations and type-forms
 Horizon Intentionality and Aristotelian Friendship 73

are intelligible only in relation to one’s historical or biographical situation.

Since no one is bereft of a linguistic and cultural community, one’s culture and
language form a significant part of one’s historical and biographical situation.
This is why cultural differences can lead to frustrations in social interaction, as
the categorization of types and their corresponding expectation structures vary.

My fellowmen see the same things I see, though they see them differently, from
different perspectives. . . . Furthermore, our goals and systems of relevancy cannot
be the same, since the “biographically determined situations” in which they
originate must by necessity differ for different persons. (Gurwitsch 1962, 62)

It is not only others who bear roles shaped through typification, one regularly
assumes roles for oneself (66). The senses “other” and “stranger” as part of one’s
experience are framed by the context of one’s lived situation. Similarly, being a
“foreigner” carries distinct connotations in different contexts.
Schütz’s instrumental emphasis regarding social relations need not be taken
as an affront to the personhood of the other as there is no requirement that
the other be seen merely as role-player. To do so would be to treat the other
as mere means and represent morally suspect behavior. Having others fill roles
and categorizing experience such that others play roles is not in itself morally
suspect.
Schütz’s view of roles importantly sheds light on the question of evidence.
“All cultural objects—tools, symbols, language systems, works of art, social
institutions, etc.—point back by their very origin and meaning to the activities
of human subjects” (Schütz 1962, 10). At the same time, “the overwhelming
majority of the rules and recipes are complied with as a matter of course, and
are hardly ever explicitly formulated, still less reflected upon” (56). That is to say,
most people do not stop and reflect on their experiences in the social world, they
do not seek understanding or evidentiary fulfillment for most of their beliefs
about interactions with others. Many operate under their largely inherited
anticipatory schemes (horizons), barring the emergence of some sufficiently
obvious incongruity that would force them to reflect. Since social phenomena are
evidenced in relation to harmonious continuities of appresentational contents,
it should not be surprising if incongruities between what is taken as experience
and evidence must generally be of a relatively obvious nature to provoke
reflection. So long as one’s intention and what transpires, in both individual
and collective cases, is close enough for one’s purposes to continue or to require
adjustments that are not contrary to immediate interests, the play of passive
synthesis continues uninterrupted and without a need for critical attention.
74 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

Each type, insofar as it has a specific horizon or expectation structure, grounds

and informs normative expectations. Each type has a normality appropriate to it
that is identified in experience, such that the experience of something abnormal
in association with a type expectation is incongruous and puzzling to one in a
basic experiential sense.5

c. Self-love in complete friendships

It is because complete friendships transcend the mediation of socially given
roles and manifest as relations between individuals as individuals that time
is essential to the development of complete friendships. One must amass a
relatively large and generally consonant body of appresentationally harmonious
evidence of the other’s person or character in order to ground this kind of
qualitative bond. One must be familiar with the individual across a range of
experiences and come to know the person, in distinction from recognizing the
individual serving the interest of some role like being pleasing or being useful.
One might argue that others are radically other and, therefore, can never be
known. However, the inference does not follow, as knowing another is not an all
or nothing proposition. Further, the claim of radical otherness only asserts the
impossibility of knowing another in totality, not knowing the other whatsoever.
Thus, radical otherness is not an insurmountable problem. It is sufficient
that the other’s spontaneous moments are recognized as being in some sense
consistent with one’s horizonal expectations of that individual. This is not to
say that the other can be known in totality, only that the other’s actions do not
appear incongruous or senseless. One has come to know the other well when
one’s sense of the other’s spontaneity is continuous with one’s sense of the other
person. One sees the other’s action, is able to differentiate the person from
her social role, and understands her act in terms of the intentional horizons
associated with the person.6
Why, then, is self-love a requirement for complete friendship? The answer
appears to have two parts, the affects of self-love impact one’s comportment as
oneself as well as one’s comportment toward the other. An individual without
self-love cannot be a friend in a complete friendship. There are two, related,
reasons for this: first, such an individual lacks confidence about her principles
(i.e., her commitments waver); second, such an individual is one whose
dispositions are not firm and, therefore, not reliable in directing her actions. As
Aristotle argues, one who lacks self-love is one who lacks self-control or who
identifies no loveable qualities in her own case (Nicomachean Ethics, § IX.4).
 Horizon Intentionality and Aristotelian Friendship 75

The individual with self-love is one who is disposed to experience the world
in terms more than merely utility and pleasure, as there are things that are of
principled importance to one with self-love, in addition to the stability and
confidence of character having self-love brings with it. As such, one can come
to love what is loveable and dedicate time to loving it, especially as found in
the other (§ IX.8). If one’s dispositions are not stable, what one finds loveable
will not necessarily be lasting, particularly in the manner required for complete
friendship. The horizon of regard—the limits on the potentialities pertaining
to one’s regard for subjects, oneself or another—must include the potency for
recognition of a subject’s being loveable as subject. What one finds loveable
is dependent on one’s character. If one lacks self-love of directed at one’s own
character or person, one will lack respect for one’s principles. One will thereby
not hold one’s principles as loveable in their own right. As such, one will not
be able to find the other loveable and be motivated to express that love unless
one is aware of what one finds loveable and has the confidence in the principles
and dispositions underlying one’s loving to consistently act on them. Self-love
is thus a material condition for loving one’s friend, for trusting the persons of
one’s friend and oneself, including those principles that are constitutive of each
person’s character. Since a person with self-love seeks their own betterment,
one is able to trust a friend who shares one’s values to be able to assist in one’s
flourishing and to correct one’s deviations from one’s virtue. This does not require
that one have a narcissistic love of oneself or any robustly developed self-love,
only that the seed for the possibility of extending it to others be present.
Further, Aristotle argues that friends are necessary for happiness (§IX.9).
His mirror theory of friendship—that the other must be similar to oneself in
character and virtue—suggests that the relation with the other is relied upon to
develop one’s character to the point of being able to flourish (Yu 2007; Aristotle
Nicomachean Ethics, §§IX.4, 11). If the other is like another self, then it stands
to reason that one’s self-love limits one’s capacity for loving one’s “other self.”
Aristotle argues:

For they say that a person should love most the one who is most a friend, and
the one who is most a friend is the friend who wishes good things for the one for
whom he wishes them, for that other’s sake, even if no one will know; and these
features belong most to oneself in relation to oneself, as in fact do all the others by
which a friend is defined. (Nicomachean Ethics, 1168b1–5)

The self-lover is one who cherishes what is fine, excellent, or virtuous most.
Doing what is fine benefits oneself and others. And doing what is fine is what
76 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

is loveable for reasons other than its utility or pleasure. Indeed, Aristotle argues
the friend will forsake utility or pleasure, for example, money or honors, for the
sake of the other when appropriate (1169a27–b1).
The mirror-theory of friendship does not require that the other be identical
to oneself. Rather, one recognizes that the other shares one’s values and aims,
as well as principles for valuing and for living one’s life. Those serve as a
ground for trust. Identifying robust similarity and coming to trust the other
enough to open oneself to the other, better informing the horizons of both,
requires time. Making oneself vulnerable to the other, the other’s coming to
know one sufficiently well as to being able to offer insightful critiques regarding
one’s person—not merely in regard to some social role—and the capacity to
take criticism from the other regarding one’s faults or missteps all require the
achievement of developed horizons.
There is a second reason that self-love is important, having to do with one’s
comportment toward the other. Finding self-love in the other is evidence for
the other’s being loveable. One will not love the other, will not find the other
loveable, unless the other presents herself as loveable. And one cannot present
oneself as loveable unless one love’s oneself. One does not trust someone who
does not hold herself in sufficiently high regard. Further, one’s character cannot
be stable enough to relate to predictably unless one holds oneself in sufficient
regard so as to maintain firm dispositions. Without sufficient self-regard, one
will not trust one’s principles or adherence to principles; one will allow oneself
to rationalize nonvirtuous actions. Time is necessary to get to know the other
well enough to see both that she loves herself and that she is capable of the
reciprocation necessary for friendship.

Conclusion

I have argued that horizon intentionality illuminates the reason why time is
crucial to complete friendships. In doing so, I argued that it is not the temporal
horizon that is key to understanding complete friendships, but the internal
horizon. Since temporal horizons modify content provided by other horizons,
they are not sufficient explanations for time’s crucial role in complete friendships.
The grounding horizon is the internal horizon associated with the other. That
shapes and informs the horizon regarding one’s relation with the other. Those
are modified over time, given greater informative depth. Time’s requirement for
 Horizon Intentionality and Aristotelian Friendship 77

complete friendships is about developing an informed, nuanced sense of who the

other is, and having one’s relationship with them guided and informed by that
horizon. This, in turn, sheds light on why self-love is a necessary condition for
complete friendships as well. Self-love is necessary for being loveable, being able
to reciprocate love for another, as well as for being able to have a stable character,
as confidence in affirming one’s principles requires trust of one’s judgment. And
one cannot trust one’s judgments unless one trusts oneself.

Notes

1 References to Nicomachean Ethics in this essay are to the text as it appears in:
Aristotle. 2002a. Nicomachean Ethics, ed. C. Rowe and S. Broadie. New York:
Oxford University Press.
2 There are other phenomenologically informed analyses of friendship, but none
address the role of horizon intentionality. Brogan (2002), Davies (1988), Derrida
(2005), Dreher (2009), Gadamer (2009), Gadamer (1989), Sokolowski (2002),
Walhof (2006).
3 Roberto Walton (2003) has argued that horizons vary in degree of determinacy in
relation to the kind of horizon and specific phenomenon. Walton also goes on to
discuss more than the limited set of horizons discussed here.
4 See also Husserl 1999, 48–9; Hua I, 85–6.
5 For more complete analysis of social roles, see Schütz (1967), Schütz (1970) and
Gurwitsch (1979).
6 See also Aristotle, Poetics, §§ 6, 15.
 5

Value, Affectivity, and Virtue in Aristotle,

Scheler, and von Hildebrand
Gregory B. Sadler

Dietrich von Hildebrand begins The Heart, asserting: “the affective sphere, and
the heart as its center, have been more or less under a cloud throughout the
entire course of the history of philosophy.” He points out paradoxes of Aristotle’s
thought in particular.
It is above all the role assigned to the affective sphere . . . in Aristotle’s philosophy
that evidences the ban placed on the heart. It must be said, however, that
Aristotle did not consistently cling to this negative position regarding the
affective sphere. . . . Reality forced Aristotle in the analysis of concrete problems
to contradict his general statements, still the abstract systematic thesis which
has traditionally gained currency as being the Aristotelian position towards
this sphere unequivocally testifies to a disparagement of the heart. According to
Aristotle, the intellect and the will belong to the rational part of man; the affective
realm . . . belong[s] to the irrational part in man. (Hildebrand 2007, 3–4)

Von Hildebrand’s emphasis on affectivity’s primary importance, particularly

in practical philosophy and moral life, seconds Max Scheler’s.1 These two
phenomenologists of value restore affectivity’s centrality in character and
personality, virtue and vice, action and practical reasoning and highlight roles
that modes of affectivity play in value-perception, response, and fundamental
preference. This counters long-established tendencies in philosophy confining
affectivity (as desire, emotional response, love and hate) to at best according with
or obeying a non-affective practical reason or intellect, ignoring its productive
and essential role. Interestingly, one attractive feature of Aristotle’s thought, which
recent commentators have highlighted, is precisely his attention to affectivity’s
importance in practical reasoning, action and choice, and perception in moral
matters, particularly of “ethical salience” (Sherman 1989, 28–50).2
 Value, Affectivity, and Virtue in Aristotle, Scheler, and von Hildebrand 79

Without downplaying their differences, what Aristotle, Scheler, and von

Hildebrand share in common is attentive phenomenological investigation,
description, and analysis of moral life in all of its complexities, structures, and
ambiguities. They also critically engage the wide range of moral viewpoints,
theories, and experiences of others available in their times. This already
suggests the possibility of fruitful dialogue between Aristotelian virtue ethics
and phenomenological ethics of value. Admittedly, Scheler and von Hildebrand
explicitly criticize Aristotle on many points, but perhaps with reinterpretation
Aristotle’s perspective becomes less dissonant than one might assume. What I
would like to suggest here is something analogous to a proposal made by Leslie
Kosman:

What we would like, but do not find [in Aristotle] is an extension of the theory of
deliberation and practical reason to account for the ways in which virtuous persons
might be said to have the proper feelings they have by prohairesis. . . . In a sense,
the theories behind certain religious traditions, psychoanalysis, and disciplines
that premise self-transformation and self-mastery might be thought to represent
attempts at such an account. (Kosman 1980, 114–15)

Phenomenological ethics of value could similarly provide needed complements

and clarifications to Aristotle’s often underdetermined moral theory, not
only about the relationship between affectivity (including emotion) and the
character-forming choice termed prohairesis, but also on several other related
matters. This short, preliminary study focuses upon the connections between
affectivity, action and choice, moral character, and the realm of values. What I
propose here is to splice a connection between two knots tying together various
threads of Aristotelian virtue ethics and Schelerian/Hildebrandian ethics of
value, a connection of lexical cognates: the Greek prohairesis, often rendered
as “deliberate” or “moral choice,” and the German Vorhehmen, “preference.”
Aristotle himself suggests this in noting that prohairesis at its core involves
preference, “something chosen [haireton] before or in place of [pro] other things”
(Nicomachean Ethics, 1112a16–17).3
Before going on to interpretation of these thinkers, two sets of disclaimers
need to be made. First, in a study of this length, there are more aspects of
Aristotle’s moral theory I must skip over or oversimplify than those I analyze in
depth here. I admit this even more about Scheler’s and von Hildebrand’s moral
theories. All three thinkers’ moral theories are richly complex, astutely attentive
to experience, highly reflective, integrative, systematizing, dialectically deriving
and refining truth from whatever sources provide or preserve it. What would be
80 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

particularly needed in a more thorough work would be studies of the social and
historical dimensions of human being, the fundamentally orienting affects of
love and hate, specific virtues, vices, and modes of affectivity, and the theological
horizon Scheler and von Hildebrand inevitably introduce. Second, the bulk of
the discussion of Aristotle is a fairly uncontroversial summary of his moral
theory. What might raise some eyebrows, however, is my choice to consistently
render Aristotle’s term orexis, more typically translated by “appetite” or “desire,”
by the more inclusive “affectivity.” Again pleading constraints of space, I do not
articulate here a complete justification for that interpretive decision.

Values, action, and affectivity

Early on in his Politics, Aristotle articulates several important insights about

moral values. Human beings are rational animals, and that dimension of
rationality, mediated through the “speech” or “language” (equally translating
the ambiguous Greek term logos), introduces dimensions transcending mere
animality in several interconnected ways. The passage runs:

Human beings are the only animal that possesses logos. Voiced sounds [phone]
signify the painful and the pleasurable, and therefore are at the disposal of the
other animals. . . . Now logos is for indicating the advantageous and the harmful,
and thus also the just and the unjust. For it is distinctive, in relation to all the other
animals, that the human being has perception [aesthesis] of the good and the bad,
the just and the unjust, and all the other such moral qualities [tōn allōn]. (Politics,
1253a10–19)

He continues, highlighting a key characteristic of the interconnection between

values and rationality, that human beings participate in communities, sharing
these sorts of values. Human beings also communicate about a much wider range
of values than do other animals, and they do so precisely because they possess a
capacity for perception of those values. Aristotle does not accord human beings
merely capacities to make inferences or judgments about moral values. Human
beings inhabit a moral world in which moral values are perceived, in which moral
values are essential aspects of phenomena. The range of these significant moral
qualities are explicitly extended in other discussions ranging through Aristotle’s
other works. Most notable among these occurs in Rhetoric bk. 1, in which
Aristotle distinguishes three main types of rhetoric, each associated with a dyad
of a value and an opposed disvalue, or in Aristotle’s terms kinds of goodness
 Value, Affectivity, and Virtue in Aristotle, Scheler, and von Hildebrand 81

and badness. These “ends” of rhetoric’s genres include the already mentioned
advantageous (or useful, profitable, [sumpheron]) and harmful, the just and the
unjust, but also include kalon and aischron, equally translatable as the “noble”
and “base,” “fair” and “foul,” “beautiful” and “ugly.” Other important qualities
include the good (spoudaios) and the bad (phaulos), the virtuous and the vicious,
and the befitting (to prosēkon).
While human beings perceive, share in, and communicate about these
different moral qualities, they often differ, disagree, and argue about such
moral qualities as well. In fact, one main reason why Aristotle advocates for
rhetoric is that he anticipates such conflicts arising, for a variety of reasons,
typically over the advantageous, the just, the fine, the good, and their opposites.
Disagreements, mistakes, even deceptions and manipulations, can occur over
which objects, states of affairs, or persons embody or express these values. They
can also arise out of comparing and ordering values in relation to each other.
Different backgrounds and experiences, ways of life and professions, good or
bad dispositions, discipline and education or its lack, as well as the effects of
one’s choices, actions, and affective responses can, in Aristotle’s view, render a
person better or worse able to rightly grasp and orient him- or herself in relation
to values.
Aristotelian moral theory acknowledges the existence and human experience
of a plurality of goods (as well as corresponding evils), embodying (whether
actually or in appearance) these various values. Among those Aristotle writes
about most frequently, and those around which one’s life may be oriented, are
wealth and property, pleasures of different sorts, honor or reputation, powers
or offices, bodily health, knowledge or wisdom, practical wisdom, moral virtue,
relationships and particularly friendship, freedom of status and of action, even
victory or success itself (nikē). In addition to these, though not in practice
dissociable from all of these, is the condition of happiness or flourishing
(eudaimonia), understood in contested manners by different people. Now, all
of the features noted just earlier about moral values and disvalues are equally
applicable to goods and evils. They are perceived as such, communicated about,
shared in, provide bases for community, but also prove sources of contention
and contestation.
The same basic type of good may be associated with different values, as, for
instance, by Aristotle’s famous tripartite distinction of friendship in terms of
usefulness, pleasure, and virtue or intrinsic goodness. Bodily health might be
valued by different persons as good for the sake of usefulness (or the lack of
harm), pleasantness, beauty, or even (mis)valued as in itself morally good. An
82 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

action typical of a vice, say, for instance, refusing to pay one’s share at dinner,
exhibiting stinginess, might be viewed by those affected or witnessing the action
as ugly or base, as unpleasant, as harmful, even as morally bad, as unjust. The
person engaging in that stingy behavior might, however regard it as just (he treats
the others as they treated him previously), as morally good (he has a mistaken
idea about how one ought to behave with money), or as prudently advantageous.
He might even at the same time sense it to be an act mildly repugnant to others,
as base or dishonorable, but remain largely unbothered by that aspect of the act
because of valuing its other aspects more highly.
Moral life, evaluation, and decisions continuously involve such interplay
between values and goods. Human beings inevitably order values and goods not
only in relation to each other, with goods understood or apprehended in terms
of values and vice versa, but in other important ways. One way is by ranking
them against each other, setting some goods or values as being higher or lower,
better or worse, more valuable or less valuable. Human beings do and display this
ranking in their own processes of practical reasoning, in their communication, in
discernible patterns running through their lives, actions, desires and emotions,
habits, and choices. Another equally important way is by arranging goods and
values in relation to each other in terms of finality, under the aspect of good
for, in orderings of ends and means. Many different arrangements are possible,
even livable, but they are not all equally adequate, and we can speak of goodness
and badness in yet another dimension, namely that of a person’s ordering of
goods and values within the nexus of their ongoing practical life, decisions,
relationships, actions, attitudes or beliefs, and emotional responses.
For example, a person of the sort Aristotle calls philonikos values winning,
being right, beating others, very highly, perceptibly ranking it both as better than
many (perhaps all other) goods and as a final end on whose account other goods
are desired, pursued, or even sacrificed. Perhaps the value embodied in such
single-minded success is that of pleasantness, which would then be similarly
elevated over other values. Or perhaps the value being responded to in deeming
victory the highest good is that of advantage, nobility or fineness, or even moral
goodness as such. Somewhere in all of this, false or wrong determinations about
the nature and the worth of goods and values get made and relied upon by the
philonikos.
How is it that we can talk about such determinations and orderings as wrong
or as false? Or, for that matter what would it mean to say that some ways of
life, certain mindsets, various habitual patterns interweaving action, desire,
 Value, Affectivity, and Virtue in Aristotle, Scheler, and von Hildebrand 83

and emotion, are right or true, or even more right or true in relation to others?
Can we also assert these about individual actions, evaluations, and emotional
responses? Several connected and characteristic features of Aristotelian moral
theory are worthy of brief examination here, for they eventually lead us into the
moral phenomenon of greatest interest to this study, the complex of character
and choice called prohairesis. These features are: truth and falsity in practical life,
reason, and action; structuring of human motivation and action by both reason
and affectivity; the extent and importance of affectivity in moral life; and, virtues
and vices as main moral measures.
When discussing moral life and evaluation, Aristotle thinks not only in
terms of goodness and badness, but also of “truth in practical matters [alētheia
praktikē]” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1139a27). He maintains that every mode
of intellectual activity (pantos dianoētinkou) involves truth and falsity, well
functioning and poor functioning (to eu kai kakōs) (1139a28–30). The practical
intellect, engaged with what is to be done or not, with desire and deliberation,
with apprehending, evaluating, and responding to matters as various modalities
of good or bad, ordering them in relation to each other, does possess its own form
of truth, “truth corresponding to right desire” (1139a30–1). The term generally
rendered as “desire” in this passage, orexis, actually ranges over a broader
spectrum of meaning in Aristotle’s texts, extending to all forms of affectivity, a
matter soon to be more fully explored. Before that, however, it is important to
point out that the truth of the practical intellect is not merely a matter of right
desire or affectivity, but also involves reason or principle (logos) being true, and
requires some consonance between reason or principle and desire, or in other
related terms, of intellect and affectivity.
Actions arise through causes. In the Nicomachean Ethics bk. 6 discussion,
Aristotle suggests “there are three main things in the soul governing action and
truth, namely perception, mind (nous), and desire or affectivity.” Perception
does not itself originate action. Instead, actions originate from what he calls
prohairesis (typically rendered as “moral choice” or “deliberate choice”), itself
caused in turn both by affectivity and by reason or reasoning (logos), leading
Aristotle to say that choice involves mind and thinking (dianoia). Affectivity
exercises the more foundational role, however, as the De Anima bk. 3 discussion
of action suggests. For the akratic, uncontrolled person, “even when mind orders,
and thinking says to avoid or pursue, one acts according to desire [epithumia]”
(433a1–3). By contrast, though self-controlled people “are affected and desire,
they do not do the sorts of things by which they are affected, but rather follow
84 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

intellect’s bidding” (433a7–9). Nevertheless, even when it seems that practical

intellect, intervening to oppose affectivity or desire, would be the sole cause of
action, this is not the case. Affectivity is always oriented toward something (hē
orexis heneka tou pasa), and this orientation provides a starting-point (archē)
to the practical intellect (433a15–17) by which it thereby causes movement. He
concludes: “it appears that intellect never moves [to action] without affectivity”
(433a23–4).
Aristotle distinguishes two different modes of affectivity in that passage,
specifically epithumia and boulēsis. Other discussions, for instance, Eudemian
Ethics (1223a26–7),4 add a third type, thumos, to these two other modes, making
a tripartite distinction maintained in his Rhetoric (1370a17–18) discussion of
seven main causes of human action. There, he classifies boulēsis as “rational
affectivity.” Typically, it is translated as “wish”, “will,” or “intention,” but in
that passage, Aristotle explicitly connects it with “reasoning” (logismon). Both
thumos and epithumia are classified there as “irrational affectivity.” Thumos
is typically translated as “passion,” “spirited desire,” or as “anger.” Epithumia
is often rendered (confusingly) as “desire” or “appetite,” and Aristotle clarifies
that it denotes desire for the pleasant [tou hēdeos . . . orexis]” (1370a17–18, also
414b6–7). To these distinguishable modes of affectivity, two other arguably
should be added. We must also include the passions or emotions (pathē),
admittedly introducing some overlap, since the other three modes figure
into the essential characterizations of many of the emotions which Aristotle
analyzes. Still, emotions such as anger, fear, love or friendship (philia), hatred,
or envy, as specific in their affectivity, are not mere configurations of the three
modes of affectivity already noted.5 Another set of broad affective, rather than
exclusively cognitive or sensory,6 responses figuring importantly in Aristotle’s
moral theory are those of feeling pleasure and pain, which are also involved in
various emotions. The painful and the pleasurable have already been noted as
a dimension of value and disvalue by which humans perceive, respond to, and
orient themselves and their actions.
My purpose here for distinguishing these five distinct modes of the affective side
of human existence is not that of providing a rigorous hermeneutical description
of affectivity in Aristotle’s works, but rather to emphasize how extensive and
complex this dimension actually turns out to be in his moral theory and his
view of practical reasoning. Returning explicitly to value-perception, -response,
and -orderings, this affective dimension remains inescapably involved in their
goodness and badness, their practical truth and falsity. The most fundamental
lenses through which Aristotle analyzes all these matters is that of moral
 Value, Affectivity, and Virtue in Aristotle, Scheler, and von Hildebrand 85

dispositions, virtues and vices, and character as a whole. To understand these

adequately, we must also understand their common joint and juncture in the
human being, the locus of moral choice or character, prohairesis.

Virtue, affectivity, and prohairesis

Virtues and vices, according to Aristotle, are habits, dispositions, or habitual

states (hexeis) of a person’s character. Virtue (and presumably, vice) in a full sense
involves “a stable [bebaiōs] and fixed [ametakinētōs] disposition” (Nicomachean
Ethics, 1105a33–4). Virtue produces a mean state or response, “relative to us,
determined by reason [hōrismenēi logōi] and as a person of practical wisdom
would determine it [hōs an ho phroninos horiseien]” (1106b35–1107a2).7
A virtuous person follows the direction or rule of the faculty of practical reason
developed within himself, while a vicious person is led astray by a faculty that
has actually become corrupted, damaged, disordered. Confining ourselves for
the moment simply to these characteristics, it might sound as if virtue and
vice, while formed as habits, through actions, and responses, are primarily
intellectual in their working, so that in virtue, rightly formed reason ascertains
the features of a given situation and then dictates to the other, lower, affective
and less or nonrational parts of the soul the virtuous response to translate into
act or response.
Aristotle also maintains that virtuous action proceeds from “deliberate
choice [proairoumenos]” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1105a) and is expressive of such
“choice” or “preference [proairetikē]” (1106b35–1107a2).8 Prohairesis itself
involves such an intimate intersection between intellect and affectivity that it
can be understood both as “affectively imbued intellect [orektikos nous]” and as
“intellectually structured affectivity [orexis dianoētikē]” (1139a5–6). As noted
earlier, considered as a cause of action, prohairesis is itself determined by reason
and affectivity, directed or oriented toward something, and for this reason,
“goodness of prohairesis requires reason to be true and affectivity to be rightly
ordered” (1139a24–5). In virtue and vice (as well as self-control and its lack,
discussed below), as components and expressions of a person’s prohairesis, the
affective side of the human person is just as determinative of character-expressive
action as the rational, intellectual side. A number of other passages cement this
centrality of affectivity in virtue and vice. At numerous points, and in multiple
manners, Aristotle states that virtue and vice are concerned with pains and
pleasures (1104b4–1105a16; 1106b20; 1106b24–5; 1221b33–1222a5). Likewise,
86 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

virtue and vice are habits bearing upon not only actions but also emotions, so
much so that Aristotle calls them both “states with respect to which we have
(ekhomen) the emotions well or badly” (1105b26–7), and “states that cause
the passions to be present in accordance with reason (kata logon uparkhein) or
the opposite” (Eudemian Ethics, 1220b18–19).
Moral dispositions are orderings within a person’s character, generated
through interplay of several things: actions, and choices; desires, emotions, and
other modes of affectivity; and attitudes, beliefs, imaginations, and reasonings.
In return, these dispositions tend to produce choices, actions, even expressions.
These are expressive of character (ēthos) and prohairesis (Poetics, 1454a17–18).
They may be virtuous or vicious in a full sense, flowing from a virtuous or
vicious disposition, or they may be in accordance with virtue and vice, the sort
of actions and choices a person with that particular virtue or vice tends to do
and make, but not from a fully established disposition. But, moral dispositions
do not simply culminate in choices and actions. They are also generative of the
affective and intellectual sides and experiences of a human being. A person who
is virtuous will not only tend toward right action, but will also tend toward
having right emotional responses and desires and true practical reasoning.
Characteristic of the vicious person is not only wrong choices, but wrong
emotions and desires and false practical reasoning.
In virtuous persons, insofar as they are virtuous, actions, affectivity, and
intellect are well-ordered and integrated with each other. Their evaluations of
moral matters are right, correct, true, for example, in distinguishing the really
pleasant from the only apparently pleasant, or in supplying the standard for
whether an action is genuinely virtuous. Aristotle contrasts the condition
of a determinately virtuous person, in which the affective part of the soul
is “even more liable to listen [euēkoōteron] to reason, for every part of him
or her is consonant with reason [homophōnei tōi logōi],” with the condition
of the self-controlled person in which affectivity “at least listens to reason
[peitharkhei . . . tōi logōi]” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1102b27–9). As we move
down the steps of moral states, more disorder and less integration become
apparent, at least to a perceptive observer, though not to the person who is
worse off, which is precisely one aspect of how and why that person is badly off
in moral respects. As a person’s condition worsens from lack of self-control to
vice, moral perspective becomes progressively more deformed (1151a15–26),
both in terms of practical reasoning and intellect, and in terms of affectivity,
emotional response, and desires.
 Value, Affectivity, and Virtue in Aristotle, Scheler, and von Hildebrand 87

Although providing incisive analyses and descriptions of many phenomena

of moral life, certain aspects of Aristotle’s moral theory remain ambiguous or
underdetermined. Prohairesis is among them, and thereby offers occasion for
phenomenology of value to supply a needed complement and completion to an
Aristotelian virtue ethics. At this point, my suggestions about prohairesis may
appear to some scholars unforgivably incompatible with Aristotle’s own declared
views, for instance, the Nicomachean Ethics bk. 3 discussions, distinguishing
between prohairesis, the three aforementioned kinds of affectivity, and opinion
or belief (doxa). Nevertheless, I propose that we consider understanding
prohairesis as a term ranging over three analogously related meanings, never
differentiated as such in Aristotle’s texts, but implicitly played upon.
Aristotle sometimes uses prohairesis to denote particular choices made by
a person in specific circumstances, choices which are voluntary and involve
deliberation to some extent. Given this sense, for purposes of analysis of action,
it makes sense to disentangle it from other types of affectivity and from opinions
or beliefs. Still, as Aristotle notes, opinion remains closely interconnected
with “deliberate choice” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1112a11–12), which does also
involve reason or thinking (1112a16). It even turns out to comprise a mode
of affectivity, “deliberating desire about things up to us [bouleutikē orexis tōn
en humin]” (1113a11). A broader, less particular sense of prohairesis would
denote the kind of character-forming and -expressive “choice” transcending
but also comprehending choices made in specific situations. When saying that
moral virtues or vices express, or are produced by prohairesis, not merely single
instances, but consistent patterns of choice are involved. In discussions about
self-control and its lack, both senses of prohairesis clearly come into play. The
self-controlled person resists appetitive desire or other modes of affectivity, not
only following reason’s bidding, but also keeping to prohairesis. The unrestrained
person, by contrast, is led by affectivity (desire for pleasure, anger, and aversion
to pain being the most common) against prohairesis (1148a10, also 1150a25).
A person lacking self-control might fail to follow a resolution through, that
is, a deliberate choice about what ought be done in the situation. Losing self-
control in the face of one’s own anger, one might also go against an otherwise
established pattern of choice, for instance, when a normally just, liberal, or
temperate person lapses into unfair, stingy, or immoderate behavior, motivated
by “showing them.”
A third, more encompassing conception of prohairesis is plausibly implicit
within Aristotelian texts, and the phenomenon of lack of self-control can
88 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

furnish a “leading clue” toward this conception. The person generally lacking
self-control does typically go against prohairesis at one level, but is, in the
Poetics’ terms, “consistently inconsistent” (Poetics, 1454a27), analogous to the
person ignorant by “not paying attention [mē epimelēthenai],” a condition for
which one bears responsibility, produced by one’s way of living (Nicomachean
Ethics, 1114a3–4). Not all virtuous or vicious dispositions seem to involve
deliberation at every point. As Aristotle remarks “Dispositions are not
voluntary in the same way as actions” for though we gradually produce and
determine them through actions and affective responses, this process often
occurs beneath the threshold of our conscious attention. Nevertheless, whether
virtuous, vicious, or somewhere in between, a human being possesses some
determinate character, a structure of personality engaged and visible in moral
life, a dynamic but enduring manifold of fundamental attitudes and beliefs,
choices and actions, and most importantly, affectivity. This I propose we
understand as prohairesis in the broadest sense, displayed and particularized
through the two other senses.

Prohairesis, preference, and values

The reinterpretation of Aristotle here brings his moral theory closer to Scheler’s
and von Hildebrand’s on a number of points. One of these is restoration of
affectivity’s centrality in moral life and theory. Another is interpretation of an
expanded conception of prohairesis as both choice and as preference into the
fundamental juncture where affectivity, practical reason or intellect, action,
and virtuous or vicious disposition meet within the person. A third theme is
that action, practical reasoning, affectivity, virtue and vice, and prohairesis are
intrinsically related to values. This latter theme remains, like a number of others
in Aristotle’s virtue ethics, underdetermined or undeveloped, and on these
issues, Hildebrandian and Schelerian moral theory have much to contribute,
particularly by explicitly differentiating and systematically working out
relations between matters all too often left confused or conflated in Aristotelian
moral theory.
One distinctive feature of Scheler’s and von Hildebrand’s moral theories
is their respective treatments of values, their many types of significance, and
human beings’ relations and orientations to them. In a comparative study of
this brevity, I can only summarize and cite the most essential features, as well as
differences, in their treatments. Aristotle not only distinguished between values
 Value, Affectivity, and Virtue in Aristotle, Scheler, and von Hildebrand 89

but also arranged them in a rudimentary order. The useful and the harmful are
at the lowest level. The pleasurable and the painful occupy a higher level. At a yet
higher level, several distinct values are indiscriminately set side by side: the just
and the unjust, the beautiful and ugly, the true and the false, the morally good
and bad.
By contrast, Scheler distinguishes ranges of values and arranges them in a
hierarchical order. At the lowest level resides the useful, possessing what value
it has just as means to a higher value, typically the next highest rank, the “values
ranging from the agreeable to the disagreeable,” which apply to sensible being
in general (Scheler 1973, 105). The next level, “values correlated to vital feeling”
(106), comprising “a tremendous richness of these value-qualities and their
correlates” (107), staged within the lived body and the environment,9 represents
both an advance upon Aristotle’s treatment and a distinctive contribution by
Scheler to understanding value. One particularly important set of qualities at this
level of value are the noble and the base (or vulgar), which can be distinguished
from the yet higher spiritual values, permitting a needed differentiation within
Aristotle’s ambiguous categories of kalon and aiskhron, as well as within the “just”
and the “unjust.” At the second-highest level, one finds the “realm of spiritual
values,” including “the values of ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly,’ together with the whole
range of purely aesthetic values” (107). Two other important ranges of value at
this level are those of “pure cognition of truth,” (108) and the values of “‘right’
and ‘wrong,’” distinguishable from other values which fit under the Aristotelian
“just” and “unjust,” for example, “what is ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ according to a
law” (108). At the highest level, taking us into an explicitly theological dimension,
is the absolute value range of the holy and the unholy.
Scheler exhaustively elaborates on the multiplicity of goods which can bear
these values and what level of value they are susceptible of bearing (Scheler 1973,
100–4) and describes key manners in which the higher values exhibit their
superiority over the lower (90–9). Another pioneering aspect of his treatment
is correlating different modalities or functions of affectivity to the hierarchically
distinguished ranges of value, what he calls the “stratification of emotional life”
(328)10 differentiating, for example, between “retributive conation” involving
spiritual values and the “vital impulses of revenge” (108). He also stresses the
intrinsically intentional nature of the higher modes of affectivity, distinguishing
affect, whose intentionality is derivative (256), from other modes such as “emotional
experiences [constituting] value-feeling” (259), preferring and placing-after, or
loving and hating. The latter play important roles in Scheler’s moral theory, which
unfortunately cannot be discussed in the detail they deserve here.
90 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

Noting two features in passing must suffice. “Loving and hating constitute
the highest level of our intentional emotive life,” involved at every level of value,
particularly the higher, by contrast to feeling-states and affects, or “the passions,
emotions, drives and instincts” (Scheler 2011, 34). As acts of the person, love
and hate also differ from preference by “extend[ing] or narrow[ing]” the “value-
realm accessible to the feeling of a being” (Scheler 1973, 261). He writes:

In all feeling and finding of values, all preference even . . . it is love that within
these spheres of experience brings utterly new and superior values into existence;
as it does also for the whole field of will, choice and action to which preference
gives rise. Love in short is creative of “existence,” relative to these spheres.
Hatred, on the other hand, is in the strictest sense destructive . . . and has the
additional effect of blunting and blinding our feeling for such values and power
of discriminating them. (Scheler 2011, 154)

This passage connects loving and hating with two equally foundational acts in
moral life, preference and value-perception, which intersect within and form
a human being’s “value-a priori” (Scheler 1973, 68). Schelerian “preference”
(paralleling the third, implicit sense of Aristotelian prohairesis) orders values in
relation to each other, both a priori and independently of any determinate goods,
and concretely through choosing goods bearing values. Preference is irreducible
to value-perception, reasoning, or feeling and perdures “in the absence of all
conation, choosing and willing” (87). It is both formative and expressive of
human experience of a world imbued with values:

Preferring always encompasses whole (and indefinitely wide) complexes of goods.

He who “prefers” the noble to the agreeable will end up in an (inductive) experience
of a world of goods very different from the one in which he who does not do so
will find himself. The “height of a value” is “given” not “prior” to preferring but in
preferring. Hence, whenever we choose an end founded in a lower value, there
must exist a deception of preferring. (88)

A person’s moral life and character are conditioned by this orientation to

values. A preference aligned or dissonant with the objective hierarchy of
values shapes for better or worse a person’s feelings and desires, thoughts,
assumptions and interpretations, actions, choices, even how choices are
framed and understood. Preference also assumes form in virtues and vices,
habitual dispositions expressive of and formed through prohairesis in its three
analogous senses. Consider, for example, the multiplicity of values embodied,
perceived, or misperceived, within a person exhibiting the Aristotelian virtue
 Value, Affectivity, and Virtue in Aristotle, Scheler, and von Hildebrand 91

of friendliness by refusing and remonstrating with a friend tempted to do

something wrong. Just for a start, the act bears values of both spiritual and
vital levels, but also entails a displeasure to the friend criticized. It is expressive
of the spiritual value of moral rectitude, as well as the vital value of nobility,
inherent to the virtue, residing in the good friend. There are other values in play
here as well, but consider: what preference must the virtuous person have or
develop in order to acquire and practice the virtue? How will another person’s
structure of preference (or prohairesis) condition their own recognition of,
and response to, value in such a case? How might a person for whom utility or
agreeableness usurps the place of higher values wrongly grasp and evaluate the
act, the virtue, the consequences, the motives?
Virtues and vices are “areas of the ideal ought which are differentiated by
basic value-qualities” (Scheler 1973, 28). Preference enables or disables virtue.
A rightly ordered structure of preference assumes concrete form through
feeling, acting, choosing, and thinking as virtue, which Scheler characterizes
as “an enduring, living, joyful consciousness of one’s capacity and power to
desire and act for what is right and good in itself ” (Scheler 2005, 22). He also
describes and diagnoses determinate forms of disordered preferential orderings.
One prime example is the complex forms of value-blindness comprising
ressentiment, a “constant tendency to indulge in certain kinds of value delusions
and corresponding value judgements” (Scheler 2010, 25). Another example is
the lack of properly receptive and oriented “fellow feeling,” since “our striving
and willing are based on our emotional grasp of values, so that a person without
appreciation of value in others is incapable of satisfying their wants in practice”
(Scheler 2011, 60). These deformations of preference and value-perception are
not identical with, but are clearly interconnected preconditions and producers
of the various vices.
One function of ethics, according to Scheler, is to provide “a whole system of
means to eliminate the sources of deception so that moral insight can become
possible,” precisely because of an “antinomy of which Aristotle was already
aware”:

Moral insight is necessary to lead a good life (to will and act in a good way).
A good life is necessary to eradicate the sources of deception in moral insight. . . .
The theoretical solution to this antinomy consists in the fact that all good being,
life, willing and acting presuppose the fact of moral insight . . . but the subjective
aptitude for this insight presupposes on its part a good being and life. (Scheler
1973, 327)
92 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

Von Hildebrand criticizes11 and refines Scheler’s treatment in several important

ways. First and foremost, he distinguishes between three types of importance.
The “subjectively important,” including the agreeable or disagreeable, painful
or pleasurable (Hildebrand 1953, 34–6), is something fundamentally different
from the “important in-itself ” or “intrinsically important” (39), a category
comprising “those things endowed with value” (36). A third type of importance
is possessed by the “objective good for the person” (54), a good endowed with
value “objectively in my true interest, which has a beneficent character with
respect to my person and which is in the direction of my good” (50). This
equally extends to the objective good for other persons, irreducible to my own
good or subjective interest (52–3), reminiscent of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
definition of friendship (1156a4–5). Another mode of importance is “the useful”
(Hildebrand 1953, 64), not a category in its own right, since useful goods possess
their goodness in dependence on other goods. Von Hildebrand’s view thus differs
from Scheler’s by rigidly separating the hierarchy of values, engaged through
intrinsic importance and objective goods for persons, and nonvalues such as the
subjectively satisfying and the useful.
Both the subjectively satisfying and the intrinsically important can elicit
responses from human beings, but there are vital differences, not least of which
is that “every good possessing a value imposes on us . . . an obligation to give it
an adequate response,” whereas “goods which are merely subjectively satisfying
address no such call to us” (Hildebrand 1953, 38). Another even more important
difference is that the call of the subjectively satisfying “lulls us into a state where
we yield to instinct . . . dethron[ing] our spiritual center . . . insistent, oft times
assuming the character of a temptation.” An authentic value, by contrast,
“addresses itself to us in a sovereign, but non-intrusive, sober way.” Engagement
with values “has the character of an abandoning of ourselves, a transcending
of the boundaries of our self-centeredness,” while “interest in the subjectively
satisfying reveals . . . a self-confinement, a relating of the object to ourselves,
using it for our own self-centered satisfaction” (39).
This turns out to be the core difference for von Hildebrand’s moral theory.
The decisive dividing line for a person’s “moral life lies precisely in whether
he approaches the universe from the point of view of value or of the merely
subjectively satisfying.” (Hildebrand 1953, 61) By contrast with Scheler, von
Hildebrand understands value-blindness, vicious disorders of character, and
wrongly oriented affectivity as expressions and consequences of privileging of
involvement with the subjectively satisfying over response to value. There still
 Value, Affectivity, and Virtue in Aristotle, Scheler, and von Hildebrand 93

remains a mistaken ordering, a wrong structure of preference in some sense,

but “the real moral drama does not lie in the hierarchical order of our value
response, but in the basic decision of whether to conform to the important-
in-itself and morally relevant values or to the merely subjectively satisfying.”
Only after that decision is made does it matter whether “we should prefer the
higher value to the lower one” (381).
To close, we must consider what becomes of affectivity, virtue, and vice. Von
Hildebrand notes that a person’s “sensitivity to values is precisely the capacity
to grasp things important in themselves, to be affected by them, and to be
motivated by them in his responses” (Hildebrand 1953, 221). While certain
affective responses can be motivated by the subjectively satisfying, others “are
essentially motivated by a value or disvalue” (212), and thus without adequate
value-perception and orientation, one becomes effectively cut off from an
important range of human possibility. Underlying this are disordering dynamics
of “pride” and “concupiscence,”12 to which “values are a scandal” (230). The
virtues are both needed to orient ourselves and are expressions of growing
response13 to orders of values. In fact when fully developed, “pervad[ing] the
entire personality,” palpable in affective responses, consistent action, even
expressed in “demeanor” (362), virtues themselves become values, precisely
of the sort through which by “being affected by values we also experience
the unifying power of the values: we become internally more unified, more
recollected” (228).

Notes

1 Cf. also Scheler 1973, 253–5.

2 Other examples along this line of interpretation are provided by Kosman (1980),
Striker (1996), Achtenberg (2002), and Sadler (2007). Fortenbaugh’s work (2002)
emphasizing emotion’s intentional structure of affectivity in Aristotle’s theory also
remains relevant.
3 A similar passage occurs in the parallel Eudemian Ethics discussion at 1226b7–8.

References to Aristotle in this chapter are to the texts as they appear in:
Aristotle. 1990. Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Loeb
Classical Library/Harvard University Press.
—. 1996. Eudemian Ethics, trans. H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical
Library/Harvard University Press.
94 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

—. 1998. Politics, trans. H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/

Harvard University Press.
—. 1999. Poetics, trans. Steven Halliwell. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/
Harvard University Press.
—. 2000a. On the Soul, trans. W. S. Hett. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/
Harvard University Press.
—. 2000b. Rhetoric, trans. John Freese. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/
Harvard University Press.
4 Cf. Nicomachean Ethics, 1111b11–12 and De Anima, 414b3.
5 On this, cf. Leighton (1996).
6 De Anima admittedly stresses those aspects: “feeling pleasure or pain is actively
adopting a stance through the perceptive mean towards the good or the bad,
considered as such” (431a11–12). But see also the Rhetoric discussion in 1370a.
Aristotle also declares in the Nicomachean Ethics bk. 10 discussion that pleasure is
not perception or thought (1175b34–5).
7 This includes determinations applying to specific situations: when one ought
to (hote dei), in the right situations (eph’hois), toward those one ought to (pros
hous), on account of the right things (hou heneka), and as one should (hōs dei)
(1106b21–2). The mean is not something discoverable and fixable once and for
all possible situations; it is not of the thing, (ou to tou pragmatos), but the mean
relative to us (to pros humas) (1106b8).
8 Other relevant passages are found in Rhetoric, 1367b22–3 and Nicomachean
Ethics, 1139a22–3.
9 Scheler calls this “that intermediate region of human nature, which I have sharply
distinguished from the spiritual personality and the physical body by calling it
vital consciousness” (Scheler 2011, 34).
10 Cf. the analyses carried out in Scheler 1973, 328–69.
11 Cf. Scheler 1973, 39–43 and 47.
12 Cf. von Hildebrand 1953, 46–9, 405–52, and corresponding analyses in von
Hildebrand (1969) and (2007).
13 Cf. the analyses of “due relation,” (Hildebrand 1953, 244–56) and of the sphere of
virtue (357–78).
 Part II

Theoretical and Contemporary

Comparative Accounts
96
 6

Phenomenology, Eudaimonia,
and the Virtues
John J. Drummond

Phenomenology is a philosophical approach that seeks to provide a descriptive

account of the essential structures of the intentional correlation between
intending experiences and the world precisely as intended in and by that
experience. One could argue that phenomenology cannot bridge the gap between
the descriptive and the normative and can, therefore, tell us nothing about ethics
in general or the virtues in particular. This chapter considers the possibility of a
phenomenological response to this critique.

Phenomenology as eidetic

Central to this possibility is phenomenology’s claim to be an “eidetic”

science (Husserl 1983, 167–70; Hua III/1, 156–8), a claim rooted in Husserl’s
mereology, and in particular, his distinction between independent parts
(pieces) and nonindependent parts (moments). Nonindependent parts cannot
be separately presented. The elimination of the presentation of one part makes
impossible both the presentation of another part and the whole of which it is
a part (Husserl 1970, 439; Hua XIX/1, 234). For example, one cannot separate
the presentation of the extension of the tabletop from its presented color, and
vice versa. Similarly, the intensity of a musical chord cannot be separated from
its duration, and the capacity for self-nutrition cannot be separated from an
organism. A moment, in other words, requires supplementation by other
moments, and it is this idea of necessary supplementation that defines Husserl’s
sense of the nonindependence of parts (Husserl 1970, 439; Hua XIX/1, 233).
98 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

It would be a mistake to limit the meaning of “presentation” to “perceptual

presentation” or “imaginative representation” or to conceive of the non­
independence of parts as in some sense dependent upon a relation to
consciousness. The point is that the separate existence of a moment cannot be
thought. The inability to think truthfully the separate existence of the moment
means that the part cannot exist separately, for the inability here refers not to a
psychological incapacity of human thinkers but to a rational inability to separate
specific logical contents from one another. The necessity of supplementing
moments with other moments arises out of a necessity in the nature of the
things themselves, a necessity in the sense of the parts themselves (Husserl 1970,
444–6; Hua XIX/1, 240–3). Hence, although Husserl makes the distinction in
presentational terms, the distinction is an ontological one. In recognizing a part
as a moment, we grasp an essential necessity, that is, the connection between this
moment and the other moments necessarily supplementing it in the formation
of a whole.
When we bring these notions to the reflection on intentional experience,
we note that the identification of necessary and universal features proper to
different kinds of experiences provides norms by which we can determine
whether a particular experience is genuinely an experience of a certain type (cf.
Husserl 1983, 7; Hua III/1, 12). In order, for example, for something to be an
experience of type X, it must possess properties, features, or attributes a, b, c,
etc., and stand in intentional relations p, q, and r, because it belongs to the nature
of any possible X that it do so.

The issue concerning normativity

The eidetics of intentional experience is thought to underwrite a claim to

normativity both by phenomenologists who, claiming that values are created
in the exercise of freedom (e.g., Sartre 1966; Merleau-Ponty 2012), adopt an
antirealist view of value and by phenomenologists who advance a realist view
(e.g., Husserl 1988; 1989; 2004; Scheler 1973; Hartmann 1967; Hildebrand 1953;
Findlay 1961).1 On the former view, human freedom is the sole source of all
the meaning and value in the world. Moral agents take the world as a task to
be completed, a task of creating meaning and value wherever and whenever
possible. Value, on this view, consists in the agent’s actively taking up the
contingent circumstances in which she finds herself and making something out
 Phenomenology, Eudaimonia, and the Virtues 99

of those circumstances by working to change the world such that meaning and
value are instituted therein.
One could claim, on this view, that normativity is established in the choice
itself—that is, one chooses for all (cf. Sartre 1985, 17). However, this normativity
is not morally normative in any significant sense, since no other agent is bound
by such norms. My choices are “binding” on you only from my perspective. If I
adopt a bourgeois lifestyle, then your spitting on the sidewalk, lying, and thievery
justify my condemnation of you (Crowell 2012, 216). But, you, having made
different choices, do not see the demands of my bourgeois lifestyle as binding on
you, and you instead judge me in relation to the values your exercise of freedom
has established.
One could also claim that in describing the exercise of freedom, the
phenomenological antirealist identifies those features of this exercise that make
it “authentic.” Authenticity on this view—which I shall call the “existential”
account—is tied to a notion of self-definition through self-conscious choice.
The existential account sees the human agent as one who makes of herself who
and what she is through her choices. Authenticity thus appears in the guise of
a “virtue.” In exercising her freedom, a human being makes her projects her
own, and “authenticity” names the disposition to take control over one’s life
in self-conscious choices so as to free oneself from the alienating social and
historical forces that threaten to make one a pawn of contingent circumstances.
Authenticity, then, is the disposition to choose and execute projects as one’s own
as the proper exercise of freedom demands. The antirealist views norms only by
how the choice is made—in a full, self-conscious exercise of personal freedom.
The phenomenological realists, by contrast, seek to ground ethics in the
philosophy of value. They claim that the objectivity of value underwrites the
claim to normativity. While their positions differ in many respects, it is a near
commonplace among these thinkers that values, while disclosed by intentional
feelings or emotions, exist independently of those feelings, at least in the sense
that a thing’s being valuable is not reducible to its being felt valuable.
Scheler, for example, adopts what I shall call a “strong” value-realism. He
speaks of an order of emotional intentionality through which a priori, monadic,
mind-independent value-properties (cf. Mulligan 1998, 161) are directly
apprehended (Scheler 1973, 68). For Scheler, these a priori values, rather than
valuable things, are the primordial phenomenon. Value precedes its bearer, and
our apprehension of something as valuable depends on a prior apprehension of
the value, an apprehension that in no way depends upon any inductive or causal
100 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

inferences from the experience of the bearers of that value. Values, in other
words, are pure, essential qualities ontologically distinct from, ontologically
prior to, and presented independently of both the goods that serve as their
bearers (possible objects of desire) and of any willing or positing activity of the
subject (18).
The case of Husserl, who offers what I shall call “weak” value-realism, is a
bit more complicated. The experience of value is the experience of a thing or
situation as valuable for the experiencing agent (Husserl 1988 [Hua XXVIII],
255). The reference to the experiencing agent is important, for it entails that the
value-attributes of experienced things do not have their sense and being entirely
independent of any reference to mind. Husserl insists that while values have
their being and sense independent of an actual, individual mind, they do not
have that being and sense apart from a reference to possible minds for whom
the thing or situation would be valuable. This reference to possible mind entails
that values are disclosed only in relation to minds that are characterized by
certain interests in things, by certain desires, cares, and commitments. Values
are subject-relative, dyadic attributes of things; nevertheless, the objectivity of
values is preserved insofar as any possible subject having or entertaining similar
interests, desires, cares, or commitments would recognize the thing as having
the same value-attributes.
For both strong and weak value-realism, the objective value supplies the
norm that ought to govern our affective responses—that is, our valuations,
as well as the desires and actions rooted therein. But this fact points directly
toward the problem raised by the critique. Even if, the argument would run,
the description of the intentional structures can identify the essential structures
of valuation and choice—that is, the essential structures operative in the way
that agents make moral sense of the world and act in it—they do so only in
relation to the subject’s emotions or freedom. The universality of these emotive
and volitional structures would ground only the universality of the how of
evaluative and volitional intentionality. In the best case scenario—so the
argument runs—the phenomenological description can provide a norm for
determining only whether a particular instance is a genuine instance of valuing
or choosing. It cannot provide a norm for determining the appropriateness or
inappropriateness of the valuation or the rightness or wrongness of the choice
of an action. We have no basis, the critique concludes, for judging the success or
failure of the evaluation or choice with respect to its objective content. So, both
the value-idealist and the value-realist fall short of providing any normative
content for a phenomenological ethics.
 Phenomenology, Eudaimonia, and the Virtues 101

Intentionality’s teleology

This critique is correct as far as it goes. But it goes only as far as examining
the subject-object correlation at work in the experience of valuable things. In
attempting to locate a ground of normativity for a phenomenological ethics,
I shall examine a different kind of intentional relation, one that exists between
essentially different kinds of intentions, namely, empty and full intentions.
An empty intention is one that re-presents (as in memory) or makes present
(as in imagination or language) an object that is absent to consciousness.
Empty intentions are contrasted with full intentions. Full intentions either (1)
present an object intuitively by virtue of their involving a sensuous dimension
that depends on the immediate presence of an object or (2) present an object
that, while not intuitively present, is presented with the aid of a phantasm,
that is, with the aid of the retention of previous experience involving such a
sensuous dimension. Empty intentions, on the other hand, make an object
present without an intuitive basis for the presentation, without any sensuous or
phantasmal basis. In the dynamic interplay of intentions a full intention is called
“fulfilling” in relation to an empty intention when the full intention sensuously
or phantasmally presents the object as it has been emptily intended and thereby
“satisfies” or “fulfills” the empty intention.
The distinction between empty and fulfilling intentions reveals the teleological
dimension in the experiential life phenomenology describes. Reason involves a
striving for evidence, where “evidence” is understood as the experience of the
agreement between what is meant in an empty intention and what is sensuously
or phantasmally given in a fulfilling intention (Husserl 1983, 345; Hua III/1,
334). In the case of a cognitive judgment, for example, evidence is the act in
which I am aware of the “congruence” (Deckung) between the sense of an
assertion and the sense displayed by the given state of affairs (Husserl 1970,
766; Hua XIX/2, 652; 2001, 146–7; Hua XI, 102; 1969, 123; Hua XVII, 128).2
In the course of justifying our judgments, we become habituated to the
interplay between the propositional sense of the empty intention and the
state of affairs as intended in the full intention. The teleological concern with
evidence becomes part of the judging experience in the fullest sense of that
experience. This habituated interplay informs even our everyday judging. It is
found in the transitions from unarticulated experience or from unreflectively
accepted beliefs that are handed down in tradition or communicated by others
to the active, evidential taking over of a judgmental content as the agent’s own
conviction.
102 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

While the evidential experiences for which reason strives take different
forms in cognition and the theoretical sciences, in valuation and the axiological
sciences, and in choice and the practical sciences, the task of reason is always the
same, namely, to ensure in fulfilled, evidential experiences the “truthfulness” of
our judgments about what is the case, about what is valuable, and about what
is right to do (Husserl 1983, 335; Hua III/1, 323). An agent is rational in the
full sense when in an evidential experience she determines for herself what
is true, adopts the appropriate evaluative attitudes, or decides what is rightly
done. The agent who is rational in the full sense is self-responsible or “authentic”
(Husserl 1989, 281–2; Hua IV, 268–9). Such an agent takes responsibility for
her convictions and for disclosing the evidence that warrants those convictions.
The life of the authentic agent, in other words, is the life of responsible self-
realization as an agent with tested and evidenced beliefs and convictions. It is in
this self-responsible pursuit of what is truthful in all the spheres of reason that
we properly locate the eudaimonistic character of a phenomenological axiology.
The flourishing life for rational agents is the self-responsible or “authentic” life.
The “phenomenological” account of authenticity differs from the “existential”
account in three significant ways: (1) whereas the existential account connects
authenticity to human freedom, the phenomenological account connects
authenticity to truthfulness; (2) whereas the existential account ties authenticity
to self-definition through self-conscious choice, the phenomenological account
ties authenticity to self-realization insofar as the flourishing agent realizes herself
as a truthful and responsible agent; and (3) whereas authenticity on the existential
view appears in the guise of a “virtue,” authenticity on the phenomenological
view is the end, not the manner, of rational agency. The phenomenological
account by no means denies freedom in matters of cognition, feeling, or acting.
Our judgments are not caused by the things whose proper sense we seek, but
they are normed—at least to some degree—by what the things truly are even
as our interests, cares, and commitments necessarily contribute to our sense
of what the things are and what they ought to be. Because authenticity on the
phenomenological view is tied to truthfulness, it cannot have the same content-
neutrality that authenticity on the existential view does.

Truthfulness in the axiological and volitional spheres

Given our interest in a phenomenological ethics, let us focus on how evidence

is realized for axiological and practical reason. Consider first the axiological
 Phenomenology, Eudaimonia, and the Virtues 103

sphere. Evaluative experiences, according to a view widely shared by

phenomenological realists, apprehend the valuable thing in a moment of feeling
or an episodic emotion that is founded on a “presentation” (Brentano 1995, 45,
80, 276; cf. also Husserl 1988 [Hua XXVIII], 252). I believe this foundational
claim is better stated as follows: the sense of the valued thing must comprise
distinguishable layers such that a “presentational” layer—the layer presenting
the object as having nonaxiological properties x, y, and z—founds an affective
layer—the layer presenting the thing as, say, likeable or fearsome. On this view,
value-attributes are the correlates of intentional feelings and episodic emotions
that are the affective response to the nonaxiological properties of a thing by a
subject with a particular experiential history and with particular interests, cares,
and commitments. The value-attributes intended are neither separate from nor
reducible to the nonaxiological properties on which they are founded, and our
valuations track these nonaxiological properties. Conversely, the nonaxiological
properties provide reasons for the valuation accomplished in the affective
response.
Value-attributes exist independently of those feelings and emotions, at least
in the sense that a thing’s being valuable is not reducible to its being felt valuable.
Rather, the valuable is that toward which the valuing feeling or episodic emotion
is correct or appropriate, and the intentional feeling or episodic emotion is
appropriate when it is rationally motivated by the nonaxiological properties
underlying it and when the underlying apprehension of the nonaxiological
properties is itself both true and justified.
Since the evaluative experience incorporates both presentational and affective
moments, it can go wrong in two ways. First, the underlying presentation can
be false or unjustified. For example, I might discover that the person at whom
I am angry for misleading me did not, in fact, mislead me. I might then, in
a moment of reflection, feel remorse or shame for my original anger. Second,
the underlying cognition might be true and justified, but the emotion is
nevertheless unjustified and inappropriate. This inappropriate affective response
will sometimes be corrected in a way that is similar to the correction of cognitive
mistakes. The affective response might change over time as, for example, when
someone disagrees with my assessment of the action that angered me and I learn
better what constitutes anger-inducing behavior. The disagreement introduces
discordance into the stream of evaluative experience and motivates a critical
reflection that appeals both to the particulars of the circumstances and to our
intersubjective understanding of evaluative and emotive concepts and their
relation to nonaxiological properties.
104 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

In another kind of case, someone might have an inordinate fear of heights

and refuse to go out on an observation deck she knows to be safe. She truly and
justifiably grasps the nonaxiological features of the situation and knows it is most
unlikely that she will fall, but she nevertheless fears to go out on the deck. She
herself recognizes that her fear is unjustified and inappropriate. It is, therefore,
neither the cognitive dimension nor reflection on one’s feelings that accounts
for her awareness of the inappropriateness of her episodic emotion. Rather, it is
the affective dimension itself; in fearing to go out on the observation deck, she
is prereflectively aware of herself as experiencing fear and is embarrassed by her
fear. Her embarrassment is a negative appraisal of that fear, and this affective
self-awareness discloses the underlying emotional episode as inappropriate.
On the basis of such considerations, we can modify a proposal by Mulligan
(1998, 176) and characterize self-responsibility in the axiological sphere as
follows:
if

(1) E is an intentional feeling or episodic emotion whose base p is either a

presentation (perceptual or judgmental) or representation (memorial
or imaginative) of an object or situation O and its nonaxiological
properties x, y, and z,

and

(2) “justification” in this context means prima facie, noninferential, and

defeasible justification,

then,

(3) E is appropriate to O and its nonaxiological properties x, y, and z if

and only if
(a) p is a veridical or true presentation or representation of O and its
properties x, y, and z, and
(b) p is justified, and
(c) p is a reason for (that is, rationally motivates) E, and
(d) F, a self-assessing feeling or emotion (such as approbation or
pride) positively appraises E, and
(e) no relation of justification mentioned is defeated.

Conditions (3a) and (3b) jointly address the correctness of the underlying
cognitive content, ensuring that p is both true and justified. Conditions (3c)
and (3d) jointly address the correctness of the affective response. Condition
 Phenomenology, Eudaimonia, and the Virtues 105

(3c) necessarily involves our understanding of evaluative concepts, their basis

in nonaxiological properties, and the intersubjectively achieved sense of the
appropriate fit between nonaxiological properties and axiological attributes.
Condition (3d) brings into play the self-assessing emotions that justify the
affective dimension of the object-directed feeling or emotional episode. Hence,
experiencing and negatively evaluating an action as, say, unkind is based on the
features intrinsic to the behavior itself and the ordinary expectation we have
about the behaviors appropriate to different kinds of human transactions. The
general sense of appropriate behavior is established and modified over time in
the light of our untutored, affective responses and the education of the attitudes
and emotions that occurs within the communities to which we belong. To have
a self-responsible evaluative experience, a self-responsible and appropriate
emotion, is to have this structure of justification.
As valuation is founded on presentation, so choice is founded on valuation.
Stipulating, then, that

(4) C is a choice that issues in action A as conducive to end G and whose

base is E’s evaluation of G as a good end,

we can provisionally characterize self-responsibility in the practical sphere as

follows:

(5) C is rationally justified and A is right if and only if

(a) E is appropriate, and
(b) E rationally motivates a desire for G, and
(c) the desire for G rationally motivates C, and
(d) A conduces to G as an internal or external consequence, and
(e) no relation of justification entailed is defeated.

Goods for an agent and the goods of agency

Incorporated into this account of the justification of valuations and choices is

a bifurcation in the notion of the good. On the one hand, there are the goods
that are the objects of our everyday evaluations and choices. On the other, there
is the teleological dimension intrinsic to intentional experience, the striving
toward evidential fulfillment and self-responsibility, which is the good proper to
intentional life itself. Our being as rational agents is inherently ordered toward
the good of self-responsibility in all the spheres of reason, the good of truthfully
disclosing what is the case, what is genuinely valuable, and what is right to do.
106 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

The phenomenological characterizations of self-responsible agency in the

various spheres of reason point, then, to an areteic notion of the good and to
a set of virtues of intellect, feeling, and action. They point to a model of moral
decision-making wherein the self-responsible agent weighs competing goods
or apparent goods and the actions conducing to them in a deliberative activity
that is either occurrent or that has been accomplished over time in such a way
as to dispose the agent toward a certain kind of action. As various judgments,
evaluations, and choices are made and confirmed over time, they become
convictions of the subject that inform subsequent judgments, valuations,
and choices. These dispositional beliefs, convictions, affective attitudes,
and dispositions to act—these “habitualities,” as Husserl (1999, 66–7; Hua
I, 100–1) calls them—are abiding possessions of the subject, informing a
certain way of encountering the world in the continuing and unfolding course
of experience and a certain manner of behaving in the world. They dispose
us to expect certain features in certain kinds of situations, to pick out what is
morally salient in those situations, to have certain kinds of attitudes toward
them, and to act in determinate ways. This is just the kind of dispositional
state that Aristotle has in mind when he speaks of virtues as states or habits
or dispositions to have the right attitudes and to act rightly and from the
right reasons.
The flourishing agent lives self-responsibly—judging, valuing, and deciding
for herself in the light of evidence rather than passively accepting received
attitudes and opinions. The self-responsible agent, acting truthfully in the
pursuit of genuine first-order and contingent goods for herself and others,
also realizes the goods of thinking well, feeling well, and acting well—what
we might call the goods of rational agency.3 Insofar as the goods of agency
are realized in the synthetic performances and achievements involved in an
agent’s making sense of the world as she self-responsibly seeks to know what
is true, what is good for herself and others, and what is right to do, we can
think of these goods of agency as second-order goods that are superveniently
and necessarily realized in those pursuits, at least when those pursuits are
successfully realized.
Thinking truly, feeling appropriately, and choosing and acting rightly are
goods properly realized only in interpersonal contexts when others also realize
them. The truthful apprehension of what is the case, evaluations of goods
(including moral goods), decisions about how best to realize those goods,
and evaluative judgments about our own actions, the actions of others, and
social practices and institutions all arise against the background of a common
 Phenomenology, Eudaimonia, and the Virtues 107

knowledge embodied in our collective determinations of empirical, evaluative,

and moral concepts, of choiceworthy goods, and of praiseworthy actions. This
common knowledge—our notion, for example, of politeness, kindness, or
generosity—is passed from one generation to the next, and it continues to be
examined, criticized, reappropriated, and modified within successive generations
in our encounters with those whose opinions or reasoning might differ from
our own. Only in coming to grips with differing opinions and beliefs and only
if those differing opinions and beliefs have been self-responsibly formed and
asserted can we truly be said to be a person holding certain convictions that
have withstood a thoroughgoing critique. In order to be self-responsible and to
realize the goods of agency, in other words, one must think for oneself but not
by oneself. For this reason, these goods of agency must be effectively—even if
only implicitly—chosen for others as well as for oneself.
Securing the goods of agency for ourselves and others does not foreclose the
pursuit of different first-order, contingent goods. The universality and necessity
of the goods of agency is, in other words, consistent with the pluralism of goods
pursuable in free societies. However, insofar as the self-responsible pursuit
of first-order goods requires that one secure the goods of agency as such, the
pursuit of some first-order goods is morally wrong on universalist grounds if
that pursuit blocks the realization of the goods of agency for oneself or others
(cf. Drummond 2006). Hence, first-order goods are now apprehended both as
necessarily transformed by and as yielding to the second-order goods of agency.
In this light, we can remove the provisional nature of our characterization of
self-responsible choice. We now say:

(5′) C is rationally justified and A is right if and only if

(a) E is appropriate, and
(b) E rationally motivates a desire for G, and
(c) the desire for G rationally motivates C, and
(d) A conduces to G as an internal or external consequence, and
(e) A does not frustrate (or frustrates least) the realization of
necessarily valued second-order goods of agency, and
(f) no relation of justification entailed is defeated.

This phenomenological and areteic approach goes beyond an Aristotelian

naturalism to acknowledge the transcendental dimension of the human as an
agent who “makes moral sense” of the world and whose making moral sense
is teleologically ordered toward truth in its cognitive, axiological, and practical
guises.
108 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

Toward the virtues

What virtues are appropriate for this notion of eudaimonia, tied as it is to these
notions of justification and their status as goods of agency? The immediate and
too simple answer, of course, is the wisdom-virtues: (i) theoretical wisdom, (ii)
what I shall baptize “axiological wisdom,” and (iii) practical wisdom, that is, the
dispositions to frame and justify truthful judgments in each sphere of reason.
But these virtues alone provide only a thin account of the entirety of a virtuous
life. I cannot, of course, in the limited space available, provide a full account
of the virtuous life, but in concluding, I shall thicken the account somewhat
by sketching associated virtues that contribute to these forms of wisdom and
thereby conduce to eudaimonia.
The life in which eudaimonia is realized is the life of personal autonomy, the
autonomy of responsible self-determination. I determine myself insofar as I am
responsible for the convictions—and thereby the dispositions and actions and
reactions—that make up my life. My self-determination requires, as we have
seen, not only my own personal autonomy but that of others as well. Insofar as
the testing of my opinions and convictions necessarily involves an interpersonal
dimension, the goods of theoretical, axiological, and practical wisdom are
realized in common and concerted efforts, for example, in conversation or in
collaboration or in reading and responding to the work of others. Precisely
because the good of the autonomous, self-responsible life is realizable only in
the joint activities of persons belonging to a community, the value of the pursuit
of autonomy is often embodied in political form as constitutionally protected
freedoms of thought, speech (including freedoms of the press and expression),
and association.
These political freedoms guarantee the moral space in which personal
autonomy can be exercised. That moral space is originally cleared, as I have
argued elsewhere, by respect (Drummond 2006). Respect takes the form both
of appraisal respect, in which we respect an other for the meritorious exercise of
her rational agency, and recognition respect, in which we respect all persons just
insofar as they possess those rational capacities apart from which a meritorious
exercise is impossible (cf. Darwall 2004). Respect as a moral feeling, of course, is
not yet a virtue, but the disposition to respect the rational capacity and personal
autonomy of others is a virtue. The respectful person is the one disposed to have
the right feeling—at a minimum, the feeling of recognitional respect—toward
others. But respectfulness does not exhaust the virtues required for eudaimonia
 Phenomenology, Eudaimonia, and the Virtues 109

for oneself and others or for the various forms of wisdom. It maintains the moral
space in which other virtues associated with and conducive to these forms of
wisdom can operate.
Insofar as one’s truthful evidencing of things and situations depends on
interpersonally shared understandings, we should expect that some of the
requisite virtues will have to do with our interpersonal transactions in the sphere
of reason. Chief among these are intellectual charity and intellectual generosity.4
Charity as an intellectual virtue is the disposition to exercise goodwill in listening
to others and in reading their texts so that we can faithfully understand their
views. Intellectual charity extends beyond recognitional respect insofar as the
intellectually charitable agent values the other precisely as a speaker or author,
and it minimizes the tendency to misstate or caricaturize another’s position, to
focus one’s attention on straw men, or to miss the important issues at stake.
The intellectually charitable agent attributes as much validity and intelligence to
the other as is possible consistent with a careful—and critical—understanding.
Intellectual charity is allied with the virtue of open-mindedness toward another’s
ideas. Open-mindedness disposes us to consider carefully the other’s intended
meaning, to be willing to consider convictions that conflict with our own, and,
when appropriate, to revise one’s opinions.
Generosity in the intellectual sphere is the disposition to give freely both of
one’s own ideas and of praise, recognition, encouragement, and criticism for
the benefit of the recipient and without expectation of return. The intellectually
generous person expends attention, time, and energy such that the other gains
from her efforts. We see such generosity at work in scientific collaboration, in the
guidance for our evaluations provided by, say, art and music critics, and in moral
advice and guidance. The intellectually generous person credits the other with
intelligence and develops deep, detailed, and charitably critical interpretations
and questions that advance the other’s thinking.
Intellectual generosity, intellectual charity, and open-mindedness should not
be understood to suggest that we should graciously accept or yield to any view
offered for our consideration. Intellectual firmness too is a virtue. Intellectual
firmness is the disposition to be tenacious with respect to one’s cognitive,
axiological, and practical convictions and not to yield at the first sign of
counterevidence. When challenges are raised against our own convictions and
even when they are thrown into doubt, it is appropriate that we look for ways to
counter objections to those convictions or to accommodate an anomaly within
the set of convictions to which we currently adhere. We do not, of course, want
110 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

to accept a maze of contradictions, but it is humanly normal for us to live with

beliefs that are not fully harmonious, that conflict with one another in such a
way that we are not yet able to resolve the discrepancy. The degree of tenacity
involved in intellectual firmness varies with the convictions in question. We
hold on to central beliefs more firmly than peripheral ones, and we hold on
to convictions that have been consistently and continuously evidenced in prior
experience more firmly than those that have not.
This virtue of intellectual firmness is especially important in the light of the
phenomenological notion of evidence. We hold on to central and more fully
evidenced convictions because we have more confidence in them. It is only in the
face of a genuine evidence sufficient to override such confidence that we should
yield our view, and intellectual firmness holds us fast to this rule. Holding fast to
the rule of evidence also accounts for the possibility of distinguishing firmness
from dogmatism.
Intellectual courage is another virtue closely associated with the notion of
evidence. Intellectual courage is the disposition to follow the evidence wherever
it might lead. It aids us in finding our way through the threats, pitfalls, and
obstacles that lie before us in the search for evidenced and truthful judgments.
Some of these threats, pitfalls, and obstacles encountered in the search for
knowledge are merely apparent, while others are real. In either case, however,
the fear must be respected and managed so as not to interfere with the pursuit of
intellectual goods. The intellectually courageous person, motivated by the love
of evidenced truth, will negotiate these fears skillfully.
Finally, I should mention intellectual humility, that is, the disposition to
be unconcerned about—and therefore inattentive to—one’s intellectual status.
It is not that one falsely underestimates that status; it is just that it is not a
major issue for the humble person. This unconcern with one’s own status leaves
room for concern with intellectual goods (both for oneself and others) and
attention to their pursuit. It creates space, in particular, for intellectual charity
and intellectual generosity. It leads us to rejoice, for example, in the success
of our students without concern to measure the degree of our own influence
upon them.
Someone might object that this account of phenomenological eudaimonism
and of the virtuous person is too heavily weighted toward intellectual virtues.
Let me add four caveats by way of response and conclusion. First, for rational
agents, eudaimonia must be realized in rational activities. Anything else would
be the eudaimonia of a nonrational being. Second, we must recall that the forms
 Phenomenology, Eudaimonia, and the Virtues 111

of reason are not merely—and perhaps not even primarily—theoretical. A pure

theoretical reason is an abstraction from our straightforward experience of and
engagement with the world, and indeed, it is an abstraction that cannot fully
leave behind the practical since theorizing is a special kind of praxis.
Third, and more important to say, then, is that this account of eudaimonia
and virtue points to an account of virtue in the sphere of action just as much
as it does in the sphere of reason. Having the right attitudes—emotions and
desires—and choosing and performing the right actions belong just as much
to the notion of eudaimonia sketched here as knowing theoretical truths. The
intellectual virtues identified here operate in all three spheres of reason. Since the
most encompassing of the three forms of reason is practical, and since practical
reason is concerned not merely with knowing what is right but in choosing and
doing the right, these intellectual virtues underlie our grasp and exercise of
moral virtues as well.
Finally, the attainment of eudaimonia and development and exercise of
the intellectual virtues requires the satisfaction of certain conditions, and the
satisfaction of these conditions points to other goods beyond intellectual goods
that must be realized in order for eudaimonia to be possible at all. These goods—
like the intellectual goods and virtues already mentioned—are valuable both in
their own right and as conducive to eudaimonia. Chief among these goods are
the physical conditions of food, shelter (both clothing and housing), and health
as well as the provision of a good education. These goods call forth a doctrine
of social and economic rights that can again be embodied in political structures
and institutions, for example, national health care plans and public (and publicly
supported, private) educational institutions. Once again, however, the political
forms do not fully account for the virtue of distributive justice; they simply
create the space in which this virtue is exercised, both in the public sphere—for
example, in debates regarding fiscal policy and the redistribution of wealth or
in debates about the allocation of health-care resources among a population for
whom there are insufficient resources—and in the private sphere—for example,
in decisions about charitable or philanthropic contributions, volunteer activities,
and the like. While the notion of distributive justice in both the public and
private spheres is central to the view of moral virtue, the virtue of distributive
justice does not exhaust the virtues at work in this sphere. The virtuous person
transcends what justice requires in acts expressive of (material) generosity or
philanthropy, of even-temperedness, mild-manneredness, self-control, kindness,
honesty, friendship, and so forth.
112 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

I cannot, as I have said, here recite the full litany of the virtues. But I have
shown that in phenomenology, there is room for a eudaimonism and a normative
account of the virtues. Both the eudaimonism and the normative account of the
virtues tied to the goods of agency are rooted in the transcendental dimension
of the human and the goods of agency. But the nature of eudaimonia also
provides a basis for the normativity attaching to evidenced, intersubjective
understandings of our virtue-concepts and of the right actions required by the
pursuit of those virtues.

Notes

1 Axiological approaches are not the only approaches available to a

phenomenologist interested in ethics. Levinas (1969, 201), for example, claims that
ethics is grounded in the encounter with the face of the Other, and his ethics, to
the extent that he has one beyond this grounding claim, is deontological. I cannot
engage this view in the limited space available. I note only that Levinas appeals to
underlying nonaxiological properties in his theory—the face is solely the face of
the human—and his examples of the widow, the orphan, and the stranger involve
terms that evoke emotional responses and are, as it were, evaluatively “loaded.”
These facts provide a basis for a criticism based on the position outlined in this
paper, but here I must leave it at that.
2 Findlay, Steinbock, and Cairns all translate “Deckung” as coincidence in order
to stress the identity between the object as emptily intended and the object as
sensuously or phantasmally present. I have chosen to capture the mathematical
sense of Deckung as congruence in order to stress not only the identity but how
one sense (the fulfilling) “covers” or “overlays” another (the empty).
3 I have elsewhere used the expressions “non-manifest goods” and “transcendental
goods” to refer to these goods of agency (see, e.g., Drummond 1995; 2002; 2005).
4 In the sketch that follows, I am greatly indebted to Roberts and Wood (2007).
 7

Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics:

Complementary Antitheoretical
Methodological and Ethical Trajectories?
Jack Reynolds

Some philosophers, like Charles Taylor and Hubert Dreyfus, have drawn
connections between phenomenological forms of reasoning and the kinds of
reasoning that take place in virtue ethical thought. Schematically, virtue ethics
emphasizes the moral significance of character and maintains that ethics cannot
be oriented around rules or principles, since one always needs to exercise practical
judgment—phronesis—about when to employ given rules, which requires moral
sensitivity, perception, imagination, and so forth, all of which is argued not to
be codifiable. Rather than directly answer the question “what should I do?” or
“what principle should I obey?” Aristotle and others working in his stead instead
focus their ethical reflections on other kinds of questions, such as: “what kind of
person do I want to be?” Far from the connection between phenomenology and
virtue ethics being contingent, we will see that both Dreyfus and Taylor imply
that any decent moral theory must include a sophisticated phenomenology of
moral experience, which is more than merely a plausible moral psychology, since
in their view it ought to take seriously core phenomenological methodological
strictures. If such conditions are seriously grappled with, Taylor and Dreyfus
suggest the resultant ethical position will look rather more virtue ethical than
deontological or utilitarian. While some may take that to be a reason to shun
virtue ethics, this paper will not primarily be an attempt to convert the skeptic
about the viability of phenomenological reflection tout court. My more modest
aim is to extend the suggestions of Dreyfus and Taylor and argue that there is
both a methodological proximity and, to a lesser extent, a substantive ethical
proximity between phenomenology and virtue ethics around the centrality of
character to moral flourishing.
114 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

This might sound counterintuitive, since most of the famous phenome­

nologists do not appear to offer an ethics at all, and they do not typically
associate their position with either virtue ethics or with philosophers who
have been retroactively claimed as virtue ethicists.1 On the other hand, if the
terrain of contemporary normative ethical theory is typically broken into
three—utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics—then it might also be
thought to be close to inevitable that it is the third trajectory that we associate
with phenomenological ethical reflections, and such a stipulative move might
involve a failure of imagination, taking the terms of the normative debate as
fundamentally given, rather than considering the validity of these distinctions
themselves and the extent to which other conceptual possibilities are available.
To this I want to agree, but a good inference to the best explanation will need
to be comprehensive, complete, and also help to rule out other possibilities. As
such, I will highlight a cluster of methodological factors that make our alleged
proximity between virtue ethics and phenomenology compelling and show
why this explanation is a better one than the reading of some of the existential
phenomenologists as deontologists, despite the fact that they reference (and not
always critically) this Kantian ethical trajectory far more often than any virtue
ethical one. It will be the burden of this chapter to establish that the negative
injunctions against certain ways of conceiving of the ethico-political that we can
draw explicitly from the methodological strictures of phenomenology are also
consistent with some of the core more positive dimensions of contemporary virtue
ethics (especially at the more antitheoretical end of the virtue ethical spectrum),
and that central aspects of virtue ethics are consistent with most of the explicit
reflections on ethical matters proffered by canonical phenomenologists.

Phenomenological method(s)

What is phenomenology? Merleau-Ponty states in his influential preface

to Phenomenology of Perception that it is not reducible to any single method
or doctrine; it is, rather, an “ever-renewed experiment in making its own
beginning” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, xiv). Heidegger makes some related remarks
in the opening sections of Being and Time and Simon Glendinning takes this
position even further, suggesting that the unity of the phenomenological
project is partly to be found in its very incompletability (Glendinning 2007).
Such conceptions of phenomenology, while both tempting and enlightening,
 Complementary Antitheoretical Methodological and Ethical Trajectories? 115

also downplay some rather entrenched methodological commitments to

phenomenology. While all of the well-known phenomenologists transform
the core phenomenological methods (see Taminiaux 2004), a thousand flowers
do not bloom in phenomenology. Glendinning concedes that there are certain
methodological features that remain central to his ecumenical characterization of
phenomenology—notably: a focus on description over explanation and analysis,
an antiscientism, an attempt to look at the world without blinkers or prejudice—
and even this kind of broad brushstrokes account of the methodological
strictures that are characteristic of phenomenology does more than simply rule
out the strongly naturalistic end of analytic philosophy. We might think of the
deployment of transcendental reasoning, and the insistence on the priority of
our experience of the things themselves over rational and abstract theoretical
considerations, or the attempt to get a sideways on, or neutral, perspective on
human reality as if from outside of it. These are some of the more influential
methodological moves that debar many other ways of doing philosophy, most
notably any exclusive emphasis upon the third-person perspective, and what we
might call objectivist visions of philosophy in general.
One of the central methodological commitments that can be discerned in
phenomenology is what we might call a disciplining of rationality or theoria,
to invoke Aristotle. This involves disciplining the claims of metaphysics, but it
also involves renewed attention to the question of the conditions for reasoning
and rationality. In Ideas II, in particular, Husserl discussed the central role of
what he calls the Lebenswelt, or lifeworld. This dimension of phenomenology
was developed over the years, with Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty all
arguing for the priority of the prereflective domain over the reflective domain.
Moreover, phenomenologists must use methods that differ substantially from
two of the dominant philosophical methods. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, “the
demand for a pure description excludes equally the procedure of analytical
reflection on the one hand, and that of scientific explanation on the other”
(Merleau-Ponty 1962, ix). Only by avoiding these tendencies can we “rediscover,
as anterior to the ideas of subject and object, the fact of my subjectivity and
the nascent object, that primordial layer at which both things and ideas come
into being” (219). The point here is that the method(s) of scientific explanation
and of analytic reflection (synonymous here with what Merleau-Ponty calls
intellectualism) presuppose a subject-object polarity and neglect something
more fundamental—being-in-the-world in Heidegger’s terminology, which is a
variant on Husserl’s idea of the Lebenswelt. Indeed, despite some recent attempts
116 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

to naturalize phenomenology, we should also note here in passing that none of

the great figures in this tradition are methodological naturalists, and we will see
that Charles Taylor and others explicitly draw on some of these antinaturalist
arguments in their metaethics and normative theorizing. Other contemporary
virtue ethicists also seek to describe—in “thick” rather than “thin” terms—our
moral situatedeness in a manner that generally cannot be reduced to analytic
reflection or scientific explanation.2
Of course, with Husserl’s turn to genetic phenomenology and later
articulations of the importance of the Lebenswelt, the concern with unarticulated
background conditions also means that phenomenology is highly interested
in historical tradition. Heidegger, of course, makes phenomenology and
hermeneutical inquiry coimplicated, albeit in a manner that he thinks avoids
the threat of historicism, and history is vital to Merleau-Ponty’s conception of
the phenomenological project. Indeed, his famous claim that the core lesson to
be gleaned from the phenomenological reduction is its incompleteability should
be understood in this light: experience is permeated by the social situation and
historical world of which we are part. If there is an emphasis on the Lebenswelt
that is the condition for particular forms of reasoning, including ethical
reasoning, then we can again begin to see some methodological connections
with elements of both virtue ethics and communitarian political thought, which
affirm our historical embeddedness and the deep context-dependence of moral
and political judgments and forms of agency.
It is also worth briefly noting that reflections on intersubjectivity are part and
parcel of the work of all of the phenomenologists, and they do so while trying to
avoid what they take to be the problematic treatments of others offered by, for
example, the argument by analogy that attempts to prove the minds of others or
related inferential considerations. On the view of all of the phenomenologists,
the traditional justificatory problem of other minds is misposed, and there is a
tendency for the justificatory issue to be incorporated into descriptive accounts
of intersubjective life. But if we treat experience, social understanding, political
life, and so forth, as primarily deductive and calculative, as merely based on a
model of rational self-interest in which beliefs and desires functionally cause
behavior, then the phenomenologists will maintain that we have a rather pale and
sterile imitation of the sociality of being-in-the-world. And it is at least arguable
that the sociality presupposed by utilitarianism and Kantianism does make this
kind of mistake, and the virtue ethical/communitarian position does not, partly
due to reflections that are at least protophenomenological in character. Instead,
the phenomenologists want to make articulate a certain background that is
 Complementary Antitheoretical Methodological and Ethical Trajectories? 117

presupposed but (typically) not explicitly attended to, and this includes what
Heidegger refers to as our Mitsein or being-with.
Finally, all of the phenomenologists affirm embodiment (with Heidegger, it
is presupposed) and the centrality of our emotional life to being an embodied
subject. Following Husserl, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty accord sustained attention
to the difference between the lived body (Leib) and the body known as an object
(Körper) and saw the emotions as being of philosophical significance, rather
than being something that serious philosophy must leave behind. Experiences
and moods like anxiety, nausea, anguish, boredom, all take on philosophical
significance. Although not merely psychological or anthropological tout court,
this trajectory hence does furnish the kind of descriptions of context and the
subject-involving dimension that are arguably prerequisites for any plausible
moral psychology. Moreover, they are avowedly not dualistic, not invoking a
“schizophrenic self,” to borrow a phrase that Michael Stocker uses in describing
contemporary moral thought (Stocker 1976). Stocker suggests that utilitarian
and Kantian accounts create a “schizophrenic self ” because of the stark contrast
they rely upon between reasons/justifications and our motives/feelings. By
contrast, virtue ethics applauds positive emotions and denigrates negative ones
such as resentment and envy; there is argued to be no reason-emotion (and
mind-body) cleavage of this sort in virtue ethics. Choice, for Aristotle—as for
Sartre, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, etc.—is not about rationality as against the
passions or desire; rather it involves the desiderative intellect or intellectual
desire (Hursthouse 1999, 16).

Phenomenology and ethics

The task for the next section of this chapter will be to show that various ethical
injunctions (largely negative) flow from the core methods of phenomenology
as described above. This will prepare the ground for my subsequent claim that
there are also some important substantive points of overlap with virtue ethics in
regard to the concern with character on moral matters.
Ethics is only intermittently treated in Husserl, and it is with Heidegger,
Scheler, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Beauvoir, and Levinas that phenomenology
begins to be more expressly concerned with ethics. It is difficult to pinpoint any
unifying factors but we might proffer the following generalizations: they see
important connections between ontology and ethics without being (explicitly)
concerned with questions like whether ethical statements correspond to objective
118 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

properties (i.e. are human-independent) in the world; there are normative

elements in all of their philosophies (e.g. discussions of authenticity, bad faith,
etc.) but they resist any clear prescriptions as well as the possibility of a formal
codifying of morality; they all arguably problematize the liberal orthodoxy of
their time; and while having Kantian dimensions to their work (especially Sartre
in “Existentialism is a Humanism”) none have any sort of Kantian rationalism
about ethics in which reason is central in either a motivational or justificational
sense. We might add that Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty both offer an ethics of
ambiguity deriving from their situated analyses of human embodiment, an
ambiguity which, when extended to the moral domain, is also what precludes
any unifying theory of the ethical that could be codified in an action-guiding
manner. In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir eloquently says:

It will be said that these considerations remain quite abstract. What must be done,
practically? Which action is good? Which action is bad? To ask such a question is
also to fall into a naive abstraction. . . . Ethics does not furnish recipes any more
than do science and art. One can merely propose methods. (Beauvoir 1976, 134)

According to Beauvoir (and here she also stands in for her contemporaries),
then, there are no recipes or algorithms available in the ethical domain that
might allow for the establishment of some kind of unifying rule (or set of rules)
and subsequent decision procedures. The complexities and nuances of concrete
situations preclude discovering any overarching principle that might hold for all
times and places, and which we might then take up and apply to the world and our
dilemmas within it. But she maintains that being antitheoretical about ethics, in
this sense, does not mean that philosophy cannot say anything about the ethical,
since one can “propose methods.” But what exactly does she mean by this? Let
us say that this means that one needs to use methods (methods that are, at least,
quasiphenomenological in character) to understand one’s own situatedness and
embeddedness, as well as one’s transcendence toward an open future. As she puts
it, “coming to recognize and accept oneself in one’s ambiguity is the necessary
precondition of the moral life” (81). While this may sound a little vague, I will
suggest in what follows that this kind of phenomenological preoccupation with
that Mark Sacks calls “situated thought” has direct consequences for ethical
reflection (Sacks 2005, 444). In particular, they allow for a shared view of how
ethical theory should not be done and how the task should not be conceived,
which in most salient respects substantially overlaps with the injunctions from
virtue ethics against duty or rule-oriented accounts of ethics. We will also come
to consider a more positive account of how an ethical concern with character, and
 Complementary Antitheoretical Methodological and Ethical Trajectories? 119

what we might even term moral excellence, follows from this. Before considering
the work of some of the historically canonical phenomenologists, however, I am
going to sketch out some of the core claims made by two phenomenologists
who ventured (explicitly) into forms of ethical reflection that might be labeled
virtue ethical: Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor. We will then consider to what
extent their positions can either: (a) be plausibly derived from the reflections of
said phenomenologists; or, (b) can be retrofitted onto some of their reflections
in a manner that upholds central imperatives of the phenomenological dictum,
“return to things themselves.”

Dreyfus and moral maturity

Perhaps more than any of the core phenomenologists, Dreyfus emphasizes

phenomenology’s antiintellectualist conception of agency and practical know-
how rather than knowledge-that. Dreyfus’ famous account of embodied coping
and skill acquisition need not be rehearsed again here, other than to say that he
gives us reason to think that expertise is not the possession of a series of more
and more sophisticated rules or principles (whether these can be enunciated
or not) but involves a rather more dynamic engagement with the environment
made possible by habits, skills, and which depends on the phronesis of embodied
expertise but cannot be adequately reconstructed in terms of “if-then” rules or
propositions.
In some recent essays, Dreyfus (with his brother, Stuart) argues for an
isomorphic position regarding moral maturity, suggesting that it is primarily
about an ethical comportment to situations in the world rather that about
coming to have more sophisticated cognitions and judgments about principles
(Dreyfus and Dreyfus 2004). For Dreyfus and Dreyfus, in the stage of moral
competence, we may try to figure out if our behavior is suitably reflective of, say,
the golden rule that one should “do unto others as they have done unto you,” or
Kant’s categorical imperative, which asks us to imagine the consequences of the
universalization of our actions. At best, however, such rule-following accounts of
morality and ethics will be of help to novices, children, and perhaps the morally
competent. On the Dreyfuses’ view, if we are lucky enough to attain moral
maturity, we generally will not reason about rules and principles, or even act
deliberately, but will simply spontaneously do what has normally worked, just
as they have famously argued elsewhere is the case with expert chess-playing.
Rather than rationality (or sentience, or fairness, etc.) being privileged as the
120 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

key to establishing an objective moral code, we might instead see that moral
maturity is acquired over a period of time through the way in which the body
increases in attentiveness to the salient features of particular moral situations
through experience and as one’s capacities to affect and be affected become
more developed and differentiated. All actions have consequences in the world
at large, and the affective states that accompany these actions will depend at least
partly upon how they are received by other people, which will in turn react back
upon the body’s capacity to act. In this respect, we might note that training and
“hexis” (roughly habit, or stable disposition) are also central to the Aristotelean
tradition of virtue ethics.
Moreover, for Dreyfus and Dreyfus (as for virtue ethicists), there is not
likely to be any overall theory or principle that unifies the behavior of someone
whom we consider to be morally mature. Instead, such a person attends to the
particularity of each situation, but can only do so because of the maintenance of
l’habitude and “intentional arcs” (an idea taken from Merleau-Ponty) that allow
us to establish links with our environment and fellow creatures, such that we are
solicited to respond to it and them in more and more refined ways. The Dreyfuses’
further claim is that the search for rational principles that undergird and unify
any such activity in fact blocks further development beyond the stage of moral
competence. While they admit that deliberation is sometimes necessary and
helpful (and can even be a type of expertise), to read it as endemic to morality
is ultimately unjustifiable. Rather than see critical rationality as overriding our
intuitive ethical comportment, they advocate a reversal of this priority and side
with caring over justice. Considerations of justice tend to be part of the competent
stage of skill acquisition, but something like practical wisdom is more typical of
the phenomenology of expertise. As such, we should take more seriously the idea
that moral maturity is better understood in terms of a skilled but unreflective,
egoless responses to the current interpersonal situation. Any investigation of
ethical experience should begin on the level of spontaneous coping, and the
Dreyfuses hence suggest three general methodological precautions for all moral
philosophy, which are basically their gloss of some of the phenomenological
methodological recommendations that we earlier discussed:

1. We should begin by describing our everyday, ongoing ethical coping.

2. We should then seek to determine under which conditions deliberation and
choice occur.
3. We should beware of making the typical philosophical mistake of reading the
structure of deliberation and choice back into our account of everyday coping.
 Complementary Antitheoretical Methodological and Ethical Trajectories? 121

For the Dreyfuses, then, principles or rules of thumb emerge from concrete
intersubjective relationships rather than being something independent (a view
from nowhere) with which we can assess given concrete relationships. While
virtue ethicists and phenomenologists of this ilk might agree that there is a moral
importance to impartiality, especially in certain situations, they are committed to
maintaining that it should not be understood as the foundation for a set of rules
and principles. Moreover, the codification of such principles even if based on
something as apparently unobjectionable as fairness will distort the phenomena
in question and lack the specificity that gives moral life its content and makes
any given moral issue a compelling one for us. They will also not relieve us of
the need to exercise our practical wisdom regarding how and when to apply
particular principles, and any such principles will only be morally worthy if the
person deploying them can exercise such judgment.
Bound up with the privilege that Dreyfus gives to motor intentionality
and skillful coping is a suggestion that such basic activities also involve
noninferential perceptual norms. Perception, for all of the phenomenologists,
has an orientational structure (up/down, figure/ground, etc.)3 that solicits us
to optimally come to grips with it, and we see things in terms of actions and
in relation to potential uses of them by others. Is it plausible to extend this
to something like “moral perception”? Aristotle does, and calls it a practical
aisthesis, a vision that discloses the concrete situation of action in all its givenness
(McNeill 1994, 39). Heidgger glosses this as “circumspective looking,” and John
McDowell also makes an argument of this kind. For him, our very perception
of a situation presents us with dimensions that are salient and others in the
background. Perceptions of particular situations (in the lights of given ends)
hence will dominate any deliberative process, involving a general conception
of how to live, to use McDowell’s terms (McDowell 1998). If this picture is
accepted, moral discernment is hence not primarily about evaluation regarding
principles, but is rather more oriented to discerning similarities and differences
between situations. As Dwight Furrow puts a related point, while an appeal
to principles may be heuristically handy as a kind of shorthand for previously
experienced clear cases of (say) the feeling of moral obligation, on this view “an
appeal to a principle carries no justificatory weight independently of those clear
cases” (Furrow 1995, 15). Phenomenologically, at least, it does seem that our
perceptual field is structured by such solicitations; we see someone struggling
in a current of water as requiring our help, and not just any help but help of a
specific kind tailored to the context. As Emmanuel Levinas might put it, we are
held hostage from on high, called to respond, and it is the face of the other (if not
122 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

literally the face, then an embodied presence) that calls us so (Levinas 1969). Of
course, one can respond badly, as history attests. Nonetheless, if our perceptual
field is irremediably normative in this prudential and quasimoral sense, is it not
possible that what one can skillfully do morally will significantly exceed what
one can know of one’s own moral life, as well as the rules or codes that might be
reconstructed as justifying a given form of behavior? Even if that is so, one can
always continue to ask by what right one should respond to such quasimoral
embodied solicitations to act that are part of perception.
Perception may well be linked to motility, as the phenomenologists suggest,
but surely it is also liable to sociocultural distortions and biases, perhaps with
racial stereotypes intruding too. If that is so, what kind of justification can the
Dreyfusian picture provide? A related question may be to ask how we adjudicate
between normatively loaded perceptual states when they conflict? Perhaps
such questions suggest that there is room for a hybrid theory that holds that
the ideal moral psychology involves normatively loaded perception, but that
rules and rationality should come in when there’s a conflict on this perceptual
level.4 Dreyfus can admit this, but he will argue that, even in such cases, the
latter (rules, rationality) has the former as its condition of possibility. He would
also concede that the justification for his account is partly circular. Rather than
attempt to institute a nonmoral decision procedure for morality, Dreyfus’ view,
like Aristotle’s, appeals to those who already have some orientation to the good
or some desire for moral virtue, as we will see in consideration of Taylor shortly.
And failure is possible: achieving moral flourishing does depend on one’s
culture, in the sense that if the cultural conditions are not right, it is at the very
least highly unlikely that one will become a phronimon. Further justifications
for this view are largely negative and have already been sketched: the alternative
theoretical trajectories have an implausible moral psychology attached to them
and other theoretical problems; more empirically, they seem not to result in
good decision-making, as even utilitarians will agree, hence the insistence that
a theory’s justification can well diverge from its decision criteria. We might also
invoke considerations of parsimony. Dreyfus and others produce abundant
evidence of the manner in which know-how often appears to exceed what we can
represent of it as knowledge-that, at least in regard to areas of skill acquisition
that are not clearly ethically oriented, and it hence seems that the burden of
proof here lies with the ethical theorist who seeks to codify morality: why would
the moral domain be radically different in kind from the manner in which we
exercise other skills and capacities?
 Complementary Antitheoretical Methodological and Ethical Trajectories? 123

The good, moral virtue, and flourishing in

phenomenology

In Sources of the Self and elsewhere, Charles Taylor utilizes a phenomenological

anthropology and transcendental reasoning to argue against both naturalist
metaethical positions and rule-following/duty-oriented normative accounts of
the deontological and utilitarian varieties. His work highlights that those forms
of ethical theory that seek to codify morality typically depend on an epistemic/
ontological contrast between how things really are and how they appear, and
hence constitute a form of moral objectivism that conceives of moral inquiry
as not significantly different in kind from other forms of epistemic or scientific
inquiry. As such, the guiding thought seems to be that the object domain has a
relatively fixed and unified nature that is independent of inquirers seeking to
discover that nature. Dwight Furrow maintains that this motivates the adoption
of three further methodological assumptions that characterize the work of most
of those who seek unifying moral codes or principles:

1. Diverse phenomena can be ultimately understood or explained by a few

integrated fundamental principles or laws.
2. Those principles or laws must be universal.
3. The credibility of inquiry depends upon the duplication of the results by any
competent observer. (Furrow 1995, 3)

Of course, beyond his methodological worries regarding these forms of ethical

theorizing, Taylor is also well-known for his central claim regarding our
orientation to the “good.” As he puts it:

One could put it this way: because we cannot but orient ourselves to the good, and
thus determine our place relative to it and hence determine the direction of our
lives, we must inescapably understand our lives in narrative form, as a “quest.” But
one could perhaps start from another point: because we have to determine our place
in relation to the good, therefore we cannot be without an orientation to it, and
hence must see our life in story. From whichever direction, I see these conditions
as connected facets of the same reality, inescapable structural requirements of
human agency. (Taylor 1992, 51–2)

While there is perhaps no sustained reflection on the “good” by many

phenomenologists, except Paul Ricoeur and some of the thinkers of the
theological turn (like Marion, Henry, etc.), we should note that for the virtue
124 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

ethicist, “good” simply designates anything considered valuable, or worthy, and

is hence a central part of what Aristotle called eudaimonia, which is itself better
translated as excellence (or flourishing) rather than happiness. When the issue of
the “good” is opened up in this way, any incompatibility with phenomenology is
less apparent and it is at least arguable that a concern with moral flourishing is
in fact present, albeit perhaps tacitly and obliquely, in the work of the canonical
phenomenologists.
We might say, for example, that Levinas’ philosophy has this at the heart of
his metaphysics of the other person. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas famously
suggests that ethics is first philosophy, thereby arguing for the metaphysical
priority of the other. While Levinas has little to say about ethics traditionally
conceived—that is, with prescribing moral norms, justifying them, or
metaethical analysis of ethical discourse—his work offers a continual reminder
of the way otherness interrupts and conditions our totalizing explanations. This
“other” orientation might help to open up a tradition of virtue ethics that is less
about prudential concern for oneself, or the kind of ethics of self-mastery that to
differing extents can be discerned in the work of both Aristotle and Heidegger,
and more about our obligations to the other that cannot be fleshed out in rule-
following terms.5
Equally, elaborations of protoethical notions like authenticity, inauthenticity,
bad faith, and the like are central to the work of phenomenologists like
Heidegger, Sartre, and Beauvoir. Notwithstanding Heidegger’s disclaimers about
authenticity—that is, that it is a nonmoral concept—some of his core reflections
can be understood as concerned with questions of character, albeit character
construed nonessentially, and it is even arguable that Heidegger is concerned
with that form of flourishing that is most properly ownmost to Dasein, as the
material on being-toward-death in Being and Time amply illustrates, and as
Derrida’s interpretation of this text makes manifest (Derrida 1993). Heidegger
was certainly very familiar with the work of Aristotle and Being and Time is
fruitfully read as having developed many of his insights regarding praxis and
phronesis (see McNeill 1994).
Now it is true that Taylor goes in for both moral philosophy and the idea
of the good in a less ambiguous way than the central phenomenologists do,
whether we are thinking about Heidegger or others. And whether Taylor’s
phenomenological descriptions are appropriate and exacting is, of course, up for
grabs. Is narrativity as central as he suggests? Has a moral picture of humans as
good somehow sullied the attempt to describe the complexity of our moral life
phenomenologically, thereby presenting a distorted description, perhaps some
 Complementary Antitheoretical Methodological and Ethical Trajectories? 125

kind of anthropomorphism or religious mysticism? This is certainly a real and

present danger and that is why phenomenologists are typically especially careful
and guarded in their efforts to both describe the central structures that subtend
and condition moral life, and I think to (tacitly) encourage moral virtue in a
manner that bears some proximity to the virtue ethical tradition.
Sartre and Beauvoir also offer a philosophy of authenticity that rails against
what they call the “attitude of seriousness,” which consists in thinking that
values are independent of humans, akin to moral facts that exist objectively
in the world and are waiting to be discovered. They hence write against any
moral objectivism or moral realism, but both develop significant ways of
thinking about ethics without allowing their reflections to become an ethical
code or system, since on their view, this would itself be inauthentic or peculiarly
unethical. Of course, both use the ideas of freedom and authenticity as lynchpins
in their nonprescriptive ethical reflections, and these features have led many
commentators to situate their work within the Kantian deontological tradition.
Likewise, Sartre’s famous idea of bad faith depends on not taking value as given
by certain external factors (occupation, wealth, social status, etc.), and not lying
to oneself and being in the state of contradiction or duplicity that they call bad
faith. While this may again seem Kantian, in that the emphasis seems to be
upon “inner” aspects and not being in a state of contradiction, I do not think
this is an entirely adequate reading of his work. Indeed, we need to note that, for
Sartre, the human condition is necessarily rather than contingently paradoxical:
in Being and Nothingness, human reality is what it is not, and is not what it
is. Moreover, becoming aware of one’s own bad faith is not itself necessarily a
solution or an escape from bad faith. So it is not that there could be any unity in
the human subject that finally coincides with the dictates of reason, or anything
else for that matter. Instead, what seems to count ethico-existentially for Sartre
is, to borrow some words from Kierkegaard, how one dances on the point of
the paradox or contradiction that is fundamental to all of our lives, and this is a
question of character more than a question of particular acts, their motivating
intentions, their rationality, or their consequences. This is not to say that such
matters have no ethical role to play at all, but the central question is about how
one inhabits their paradoxical world: does one try to ignore the situated aspect
of human existence, with its transcendence and facticity, or does one conflate
this ambiguous and complex situation by typically remaining ensconced within
a perspective that privileges one or the other? Is a preferred perspective on
oneself preserved in the face of counter-perspectives and counterevidence,
come what may?
126 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

While we all fall into bad faith to greater and lesser extents, it is how we
negotiate the complex tensions of human existence that speaks to our character,
which we might gloss here in Sartrean terms and call our fundamental project.
Although the idea of a fundamental project cannot be done justice to here, I
believe that Katherine Morris is right to describe it as akin to an embodied
style of which the agent is most likely not thetically (i.e. directly, positionally)
aware (Morris 2007). This fundamental project can be changed, and is revisable,
and there are multiple ways of instantiating a “character” in less vice-like ways,
even if there is no single virtuous way that we might emulate and aspire to.
While it might be rightly protested that one of the most common features of
bad faith, for Sartre, is associated with lapsing into essentialist understanding
of character, it does not necessarily follow that any concern with character or
the kind of person one wishes to be is antithetical to Sartre’s philosophy. Of
course, for Sartre, it is a mistake (and a form of bad faith) to proclaim oneself as
courageous, akin to taking oneself as a static entity, a thing-like being-in-itself
to whom the principle of identity applies. Nonetheless, others may judge that I
have the virtue of courage, or I can say it of myself in the past. Our character can
never be given or unproblematic for us, but is instead itself an ongoing project:
we are temporally split in two directions, toward our past and facticity (we have
been a coward) and transcendence and the future (we wish to no longer be a
coward). It is this ambiguous and paradoxical account of the human situation
that is the ground, then, for normative assessments of better and worse ways of
being in the world.
It is also not clear that virtue ethicists must themselves partake in essentialist
understandings of character, nor even in internalist ones. After all, particular
virtues depend on luck, training, and enculturation, and phronesis is displayed
in the way one acts in the world even though it is not reducible to those acts.
Virtues are not just dispositional tendencies to behave in certain ways, they
are about how—that is, the manner in which—one behaves, not simply what
one does and its consequences. Moreover, particular virtues are also typically
defined in a negative and nonsubstantialist manner through the idea of virtues
consisting in the golden mean between two vices. For example, rather than being
an essence that one possesses, courage is but a name given to a way of negotiating
the vices of cowardice and foolhardiness, and, for Aristotle, the achievement
of moral virtue and eudaimonia is hence a task that is open-ended, and not
concluded until death. While Aristotle’s golden mean may not appear to be very
Sartrean, something more metaethical does look like a golden mean in Sartre’s
 Complementary Antitheoretical Methodological and Ethical Trajectories? 127

work: human reality is both transcendence (it is not what it is) and immanence/
facticity (it is what it is not), and both depend upon the other and are internally
related. As such, one has to endure the impossibility of their reconciliation in a
God-like synthesis, albeit while not crudely resolving this dynamic tension in
either direction.

Ethics and time: Historicity and futurity

Although it has been explicitly denied by Kant in the third antinomy and
elsewhere, a connection between time and normativity is a feature of
phenomenological ethics that has not been as centrally explored in analytic virtue
ethics nor in more classical options, and the juxtaposition posed in this chapter
hence promises to offer something further. On this view, we are complexly
situated in time, and it is our ability to come to terms with our mortality,
our past, and not to reduce the future to existing horizons of expectation,
which becomes ethically central. We have briefly discussed Heidegger, who
differentiates authentic inheritance, or heritage, from traditionalisms or
historicisms. And it is famously time which also plays a pivotal normative
role in his distinction between the authentic and the inauthentic in Being and
Time. Although I cannot do justice to this text here due to space constraints,
we might think of his writings on resolute anticipation, a temporal idea that is
a vital dimension of his account of an authentic confrontation with one’s being-
toward-death. We saw that our character is in a sense our central project for
Sartre, albeit something that cannot be resolved predeath due to a split between
the “settled” dimensions of our past about which we can retrospectively speak of
a given character, and the manner in which this is the background from which
we project a future (and, as such, Sartre concludes that we are not that past/
character). Such themes are also emphasized in the central text of existentialist
ethics, Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity. Here she thematizes the importance of
an open future to freedom and rails against what she evocatively calls, “the
curators of the given world,” who “side with what has been over what has not yet
been.” But, for Beauvoir, we also cannot simply discard the past. Rather, as she
suggests, “to abandon the past to the night of facticity is a way of depopulating
the world. I would distrust a humanism which was too indifferent to the efforts
of the men of former times” (Beauvoir 1976, 91–2). She goes on to suggest
that “a genuine ethics does not teach us either to sacrifice [the past] or deny it:
128 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

we must assume it” (95). The picture of ethics presented here is one inflected
by temporality and how one endures(by the attempt to learn to live, finally, as
Derrida puts it in his book, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview. There
are no overarching principles or lexical codes put forward here, which would
purport to be atemporal, but it is worth emphasizing that since it is not merely
the past but also an orientation toward the future that is ethically significant
for Sartre, Beauvoir, and Heidegger, so-called “phenomenological virtue ethics”
can avoid some of the problems with traditionalism and conservatism that are
sometimes thought to afflict some well-known versions of virtue ethics. While
narrativity (in MacIntyre, Taylor, etc.) does affirm the temporal dimensions
of our lives and give this a central normative role, nonetheless this tradition
sometimes appears to be rather tradition-bound, since any theoretical account
of the moral domain with revisionary implications is ruled out as not adequately
coming to terms with the complexity of existing moral practices, and hence as
impotent to challenge them. Certainly, MacIntyre’s virtue ethics might be said
to focus on our historicity in a manner that the existential phenomenologists
do not. I think the phenomenological virtue ethicists, if we can call them that,
do not make the mistake of thinking that our current moral milieu will always
trump any proffered new principle. But change will happen by living differently,
not by proffering a new principle grounded in rational argument. Now it is true
that how we experience time does not readily lend itself to a systematization
of particular virtues. It hence might be maintained that this sort of philosophy
does not count as a fully fledged normative theory but I think this is a little too
quick: there is a concern with character in the face of temporal complexity that
ideas like authenticity and bad faith help us to grapple with and they do contain
moral implications.
Moreover, this temporal dimension also helps to explain the resistance to
ethical theories that seek to codify morality, since they seem inevitably to leave
such dimensions out, with the relevant theories typically being either atemporal
or more presentist as they seek to cohere with current opinions and judgments
regarding ethical matters. Reflective equilibrium approaches privilege the
latter—we have to start from somewhere: for example, from the intuitions of
the folk—whether they be wide or narrow. This is not a phenomenological way
of doing things. Nor is this kind of coherentist approach akin to what we find
in Aristotle. Robert Louden puts the contrast well when he suggests that “virtue
ethicists emphasize know-how over know-that” and adds that “these skills of
moral perception and practical reason are not completely routinizable, and so
 Complementary Antitheoretical Methodological and Ethical Trajectories? 129

cannot be transferred from agent to agent as any sort of decision procedure

‘package deal.’” As he says:

Act-centred ethics, because they focus on discrete acts and moral quandaries,
are naturally very interested in formulating decision procedures for making
practical choices. . . . Agent-centred ethics, on the other hand, focus on long-
term characteristic patterns of action, intentionally downplaying atomic acts and
particular choice situations in the process. (Louden 1998, 204)

On Louden’s view, then, act-centered ethics is atemporal in the sense that it

shifts attention to abstract decision procedures, whereas virtue ethics, or agent-
centered ethics, is concerned with patterns of action over long periods of time.

Theory and antitheory:

Phenomenology and virtue ethics

We have, of course, only touched on the work of a few phenomenological

philosophers here, but the analogy with virtue ethics seems reasonably strong.
Both typically share an antitheoretical perspective, which is not to intimate
that they are bereft of theory tout court, but simply to indicate that there
is widespread skepticism about the possibility of articulating ethical rules,
principles, or formal systems, which will allow for the codification of morality
and prescriptive norms regarding it. More positively, both focus on features to
do with character that warrant thick descriptions (and moral praise), including
dimensions that seem closely related to the form and manner in which one
endures, rather than discrete actions, noble intentions, or judging particular acts
as right or wrong in a manner that conveys little information. The complexity
of moral matters also, arguably, problematizes any systematizing ambition of
theoretical virtue ethicists, or those virtue ethicists who aim to order and rank
particular virtues in such a manner as to facilitate stronger action-guidance.
Although we have not made this explicit throughout this chapter, one of the
worries from phenomenology about theoretical codifications of ethics is the
extent to which they become a form of intellectualism or what Merleau-Ponty
calls high-altitude thinking. And the dominant view in ethics today is still that
principles, or theories, are privileged and thought to be necessary for action-
guiding force. For example, in a recent book, Brad Hooker, Elinor Mason, and
Dale Miller argue that two key ideas are fundamental to morality: that it ought
130 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

to contain certain rules or principles that we can follow; and that consequences
matter (Hooker, et al. 2000, 1). On such a view, the task of ethical theory is
to come up with a code of rules or principles, that would, ideally, (a) allow a
decision procedure for determining right action in a particular case, and that
(b) could be stated in such terms that any nonvirtuous person could understand
it and apply it correctly. These views are widely shared in analytic ethics, even
by those who also think that ethics is not foundational but instead needs to take
into account our intuitions via the method of reflective equilibrium. It is for
this reason that although virtue ethics has returned with some force in analytic
philosophy in recent years, it remains highly controversial. Thomas Hurka,
for example, has rebuked Wittgenstein, McDowell, and Bernard Williams, for
their antitheoretical positions in regard to ethics: “an anti-theoretical position is
properly open only to those who have made a serious effort to theorize a given
domain and found that it cannot succeed” (Hurka 2004, 252). Without this initial
effort, Hurka suggests that antitheoretical philosophers are just being lazy. This
charge can be reversed, of course. While it is indeed intellectually difficult to
construct any set of moral codes that might encompass the richness of our moral
life in such a manner as to genuinely enable it to have action-guiding force, is
not there also something lazy in imagining moral life as the implementation
of these rules or principles? Not only does it underestimate the complexity of
concrete moral situations, but it also deprives the moral agent of their morality
in a peculiar sense, since they are essentially meant to follow rules. As would
be clear from the foregoing, I think that the phenomenologists and the virtue
ethicists are right in insisting that the answer is not the promulgation of new
codes, principles, or formal systems. Together phenomenology and virtue ethics
offer some complementary antitheoretical trajectories for thinking about ethics
that promise to be mutually enlightening. Virtue ethics may be typically said
to be protophenomenological, and greater attentiveness to phenomenological
methods may help it to avoid any naïve assumption of human goodness, say, as
well as the problem of conservatism through the more thorough thematization
of time offered by phenomenology, an account which takes seriously narrativity
but isn’t beholden to it (see Carr 1991).6 Phenomenologists, on the other hand,
typically only relatively vaguely gesture toward ethics, but virtue ethics has been
show to cohere with central methodological dimensions of phenomenology, and
thus it opens up a trajectory through which such phenomenological insights may
be more systematically developed and explored, perhaps to give them stronger
action-guiding force but also to allow more detailed philosophical reflections on
 Complementary Antitheoretical Methodological and Ethical Trajectories? 131

these ethical dimensions that have often been concealed and covered over, as if
something akin to phenomenology’s dirty secret. Perhaps that secret is not so
dirty after all.

Notes

I’d like to thank the audiences at the Australian Catholic University and the Australasian
Association of Philosophy in 2012 for their feedback on earlier versions of this paper.

1 While Hegel is vital for the French phenomenologists, his influence largely
revolves around Phenomenology of Spirit rather than texts like Philosophy of Right
on the basis of which Hegel has been claimed to be a virtue ethicist.
2 As Andy Lamey pointed out to me, there are some naturalist virtue ethicists who
emphasize our biology and evolution and the manner in which this accounts for
what flourishing or eudaimonia consists in. But on the view that I am proposing
here, normative questions regarding how one ought to live, the kind of person one
wants to be, cannot ultimately be answered by such accounts. As such, the claims
of this paper regarding a methodological proximity with phenomenology do not
extend to the strongly naturalist end of contemporary virtue ethics.
3 Every figure has an optimal context in which to view it, for example. See S. Kelly
(2005).
4 Thanks to Colin Marshall for this suggestion.
5 As Dwight Furrow suggests, it emphasizes the suffering of the other in a manner
that avoids a utilitarian calculus regarding it and other related theoretical
approaches. For more on this, see Stan van Hooft (2005).
6 Thanks to Jeff Hanson for conversations around this issue.
 8

Virtues, Values, and the Heart:

The Phenomenology of Scheler and
von Hildebrand
Robert E. Wood

Early Phenomenologist Max Scheler and his friend, Dietrich von Hildebrand,
sought to develop the insight expressed in Pascal’s famous adage: “The heart has
its reasons of which reason knows nothing” (Pascal 1941, §277). For Scheler,
heart as the ground of the emotional life has its own order, its own reasons, its
own laws—in fact, for him these laws are every bit as rigorous as those of logic
and mathematics (Scheler 1973, 63). Scheler thus sets himself firmly against the
very common view that human emotion, rooted in the heart, is a chaos that has
to be ordered by reason and will. “That ethics can and must be both absolute and
emotional has rarely ever been considered” (254).
For both thinkers, the heart as the ground of emotional life is also the ground
of the virtues and is correlate to the realm of values. For Scheler, “emotional
intuition,” grounded in fundamental dispositions, is what allows us to perceive
values (Scheler 1973, 254). In this chapter, I will explore Scheler’s and von
Hildebrand’s understanding of virtues, values, and the heart.

Values and the heart

Von Hildebrand begins his book on the heart with a challenge: “. . . it is high
time we lifted the ban on the affective sphere and discovered its spiritual role.
We must acknowledge the place which the heart holds in the human person—a
place equal in rank to that of the will and the intellect” (Hildebrand 2007, 16). In
his essay on Ordo Amoris (1914–16), Scheler proclaims that “the heart deserves
 Virtues, Values, and the Heart 133

to be called the core of man as a spiritual being much more than knowing and
willing do” (Scheler 1972a, 100). Again, “man, before he is an ens cogitans or an
ens volens, is an ens amans” (110–11).
There are good reasons for discrediting the heart: emotional hysteria skews
the adequate assessment of one’s situation; sentimentality is out of balance with
the kind of responses proper to a comprehensively developed heart; preachers
often exhibit the counterfeiting of emotional life by rhetorical inauthenticity
(Hildebrand 2007, 3–5).
Von Hildebrand further broadens his consideration of the pathology of the
heart. The heart can whither up to such an extent that one reaches the state of
heartlessness, as in the cases of Richard III and Don Giovanni, or the religious
fanatic who burned witches or the embittered person who experiences the collapse
of all values. There is also the atrophy of the heart because of the hypertrophy
of intellect or will (6–10). For example, late in his life, Darwin lamented how
dedication to his work made him unable to appreciate the sort of things of which
poetry speaks. Darwin’s case follows the hypertrophy of the intellect. For both
Scheler and von Hildebrand, through the dominance of instrumental reason
in contemporary culture and self-glorification in the conquest of the physical
world, lack of reverence becomes a specific defect of our age (Scheler 1972b,
30; Hildebrand 1969, 1–15). With that we have lost the sense of encompassing
mystery and an inner relation to the Holy where all things become theophany.
In the Stoics and in Kant, the aim is the dominance of the will over feeling.
For Scheler, Kant, “the colossus of steel and bronze,” is not only the one who
single-handedly demolished traditional eudaimonistic and success-oriented
views of the moral life, he is also one who set himself strongly against the life
of feeling as a chaos without the control of the rational will (Scheler 1973, 6).
Scheler’s major work, Formalism in Ethics and the Ethics of Value-Content,1
both appropriates Kant’s critique and opposes its formalism as expressed in the
categorical imperative. The universalizability of one’s maxims for action is the
moral criterion (Kant 1959, 64–7). Scheler notes that this tells us nothing about
the content of our acts; but the life of the heart as the life of feeling at its deepest
level unveils to the person value-contents that are directive of one’s life (Scheler
1973, 45–111; Blosser 1995).
Scheler distinguishes the ego from the person. The ego is the object of
psychology, but the person cannot be an object (Scheler 1961, 46). By its
relation to the Whole and its intentional directedness “outside,” the person
as the initiating subject stands above the ego and its experiential stream and
134 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

acts into it from above (Scheler 1973, 385, 468; Blosser 1995, 165–6). The ego
is passive to what the sensory system presents, but the person acts by attending
in various ways to the given (Scheler 1973, 72). This would seem not to apply to
emotional phenomena that, like sensations, are passively received, stimulated
from without or from below, but arise from within. Yet for both Scheler and
von Hildebrand, rightly oriented love makes possible what Scheler calls the
“emotive intentionality” or “intentional feeling” of values. “Being moved” in this
way takes the person outside him/herself. One has therefore to distinguish such
intuition from feeling-states that may indicate malorientation (Scheler 1973,
255–9; Spader 2002, 84–9).
For Scheler, the person is never an object or a thing; it is “the immediately
co-experienced unity of experiencing,” the unitary background, constantly
changing, for every kind of act (Scheler 1973, 371, 427). The whole person lives
in each act, so that acts, though episodic in relation to the life-stream, are not
episodic in relation the person (385). Each act is integrated into the background
determined by the ordo amoris.
Again against Kant, Scheler maintained that, beyond universalizability, there
are individualized moral callings, vocations for both individuals and groups
(Scheler 1972a, 115; 1973, 513). A person is not simply an instance of human
nature; it is a unique individual center of initiative in the on-going course of
the world. Scheler understands essence to have both a universal and, in the
case of a human being, a distinctively individual character. Each person has
his/her “value-essence,” what that person is meant to be and to which an
individual may be blind. It is another’s love for the person that is able to discern
the value-essence and awaken it in the beloved (Scheler 1973, 488–94). It is
egoism, rooted in pride and concupiscence, that blinds one to genuine self-love
(244; Hildebrand 1953, 200–20). What is required here is reverence for one’s
self (Scheler 1972b, 27) that, through its being awakened by the lover, gives one
access to his/her own value-essence (Scheler 1973, 488).
Scheler’s focus on the uniqueness of the person and its unique vocation is
developed further in the sense of “unique values and their interconnection.”
However, one has to add: not over against, but in addition to universal
values (Scheler 1973, 492–3). Within the framework of those changeless
universal values, Scheler underscores both the uniqueness and the continuous
developmental flux of the person. Ultimately, Scheler’s ethics is grounded, not
only on values, but on the dignity of the person who bears his/her unique value-
essence (Spader 2002, 140). He holds the same claim to uniqueness for groups
 Virtues, Values, and the Heart 135

and cultures: each is the locus of unique callings, unique variations on the
essential values (Scheler 1972a, 115).
In Scheler’s view, the person itself is “a continuous actuality” (Scheler 1973,
85, n. 52), directed to different essential orders integrated into the one on-going,
unique field of personal action (371). We should understand “continuous
actuality” here in terms of Aristotle’s distinction between first and second act
(On the Soul, 413a).2 First act would refer here to a power that is actualized in
second act. Asleep, the person still is a “continuous actuality” in the order of
first act developed in virtues and skills. When asleep, one does not lose one’s
honesty, one’s love for one’s children, or one’s mastery of the English language.
Von Hildebrand introduces the term “superactuality” for those enduring traits,
especially as they involve one’s root orientation, the direction of one’s heart
(Hildebrand 1953, 241).
For Scheler, the person is correlate to world. The mode of correlation here
is not scientific but lived. In what Scheler calls “the natural way of taking the
world,” each individual person is surrounded by a milieu appearing in relation to
his/her ordo amoris. Milieu-things, with their attractions, repulsions, and value-
neutralities, are prior to perceptual objects and thought objects, that is, prior to
the objects of natural science: milieu-things are “what one effectively experiences”
(Scheler 1973, 139). They are located within the individual’s Weltanschauung that
is not, like the scientific Weltanschauung, something deliberately constructed,
but an a priori relation to what might confront him/her within the Whole—a
lived view, initially absorbed from one’s cultural environment, that has grown
up within time and continues to develop over time in individuals. An individual
ordo amoris, his/her order of preference is prior to conscious acts, prior
therefore to representation and therefore to conscious purpose (87, 112). Like
the preconscious adjustments of one’s lived body, consciousness is also rafted
upon the preconscious orientation of the heart that grounds our conscious acts
by directing them. The heart’s proclivities are the default mode for spontaneous
human behavior. For von Hildebrand, what he calls “the superactual existence of
stances and attitudes” is located, not in the unconscious nor, like the operations
of the lived body, in the preconscious; the superactual is located in the sphere of
the “superconscious” (Hildebrand 2009, 46). This suggests the orientation “from
above” on the basis of which the person is said to act down into the lived stream
of time.
Our everyday relation to things is stereotypical: we glance, categorize, and
routinely respond, guided by our own ordo amoris and its lived Weltanschauung.
136 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

When the heart is involved, certain things have always already stepped out of
indifference. But in privileged moments, there is an epiphany of the beautiful,
the holy, the noble. There is here a peculiar mode of vision that belongs to the
heart: von Hildebrand underscores the esthetic moment, for example, seeing
the splendor and glory of the cosmos, its mysteries and tragedies, its character
as a vale of tears (Hildebrand 2007, 58). Such “seeing” involves “the whole
person” and not simply an abstractive intellect. It lies at the origin of poetry.
We are touched; a transformation is initiated and we are called upon to decide
about the direction of our lives. Rilke referred to this when he enigmatically
remarked that, in contemplating the beautiful in a work of art, one might
experience this imperative: “You must change your life” (Rilke 1995). One
experiences a push in the direction of transformation. Due response to the
beautiful provides an opening to reverence which, according to von Hildebrand,
is the mother of all virtues (Hildebrand 1970, 43). Reverence, operating in
the depth of the soul in one order, stimulates reverence in all orders of value.
An esthetic experience therefore need not be an isolated episode; it can open
up the deepest stratum of the self that is correlate to values; it can affect the
direction of one’s heart.
Fellow phenomenologists like Heidegger have repudiated talk of “values”
(Heidegger 1977a, 225). But I would suggest that values are another way of
talking about what were called “the transcendental properties of being,” ways of
specifying Being that cut across the hierarchy of things—the element, the plant,
the animal, the human, the angelic, the divine. The properties are more richly
articulated at each higher level of the hierarchy. Each transcendental focuses an
aspect of the way Being presents itself. Thus we have the beautiful in the esthetic
order, the good in the moral order, and the true in the intellectual order. One
might consider the Holy under the aspect of oneness (Hildebrand 1953, 145). In
each case, the value involved requires a due response founded upon openness.
But one does not simply respond, for example, to the beautiful as a value; one
responds to the beautiful as carried in a unique way by the individual things we
encounter. It is not the case that one can downplay or leap over the individual in
order to get at the overarching value. One does not get at the value unless one is
properly devoted to the individuals that carry it (Frings 1997, 24).
Though each person has his/her unique ordo amoris, for Scheler and von
Hildebrand, there is an objective order of values which can provide a measure.
In determining the right ordo, von Hildebrand distinguishes the subjectively
satisfying, the objective good for the person, and value (Hildebrand 1953, 80, 89).
For example, beauty as a value is reducible neither to the subjectively satisfying
 Virtues, Values, and the Heart 137

nor to an objective good for the person. In considering the objective good of the
person, von Hildebrand, together with Scheler and Kant, rejects eudaimonism
according to which happiness, as the objective good of the person, cannot be the
purpose—even in achieving that good (Scheler 1973, 239–53; Hildebrand 1953,
302–11). For the objective good of the person is found, not when it is sought, but
when one responds to a value “for its own sake.”
For Scheler, the subjectively satisfying is the lowest level of value; for von
Hildebrand, it stands outside the level of value. Von Hildebrand realized the
difference when he was looking at a window display of pastry (A. Hildebrand
2000, 115–16). Though there is nothing intrinsically wrong with liking pastry,
there is no obligation involved; choice here is a matter of individual preference.
This is not so in the realm of values. There is an obligation involved that is not
motivated by the subjectively satisfying. What is beautiful, true, good, or holy
requires a “due response” (Scheler 1973, 349–57). The problem comes in making
the subjectively satisfying into the basic criterion of choice.
The highest level values are correlate to spiritual feelings. They are to be
distinguished from psychic feelings or pervasive moods like vitality, joviality,
anxiety, depression, and the like that lack specific intentionality. Unlike such
psychic states, spiritual states are consciously motivated: they are intentional;
they have definite objects to which appropriate emotional responses are due.
However, genuinely spiritual experience is not simply intellectual and
volitional; it belongs more fundamentally to the heart. In its deepest sense,
the heart attains a spiritual giftedness that does not obliterate but solicits one’s
free cooperation. There is a passivity that requires both prior openness and
the disposition for appropriate response. In all giftedness, from the talented
athlete to the genius composer and the saintly mystic, one has to prepare for and
cooperate with one’s peculiar gift before it can come to fruition. Where heart and
will and intellect come to coalesce, this is the state of genuine love, whether for
persons or for things. Here one does not abstract from understanding, as if love
were blind. In certain respects, it is this kind of love that makes one clairvoyant
with respect to value.
In determining the hierarchy of value, Scheler lays out several criteria
(Scheler 1973, 91–9; Frings 1997, 31–3) that indicate an objective order:
enduring values are objectively more valuable than transient values: one’s moral
commitment is more valuable than one’s particular enjoyments. Values capable
of being shared are more valuable than the nonsharable: knowledge, esthetic
experience, and religious participation are more valuable than money or food
(though, of course, both are essential). One might add, love between persons.
138 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

Though the sharing here is centered around the loving pair, love tends to diffuse
itself beyond the couple.
The ultimate criterion Scheler discusses is depth of contentment. Contentment
here must not be seen as complacency; it must be seen within the overall
content of one’s life. Scheler stresses the Augustinian motif of the restless
heart, awareness of the direction of which modern man has lost (Scheler 1972a,
113–14; Augustine 1977, I. 1, 3). The exclusive pursuit of the subjectively
satisfying as basic value leads to endless variety with diminishing satisfaction.
It produces “a self-propagating unrest, restlessness, haste, and torment” and
makes one increasingly powerless to resist.
There is a second basic direction of life, that of opening oneself up to spiritual
values. On the moral level, in the highest personal love there is “the increased
depth of absorption” and “a growing sense of repose and fulfillment.” Love
shows the infinity of our basic desire: true love involves a lifting of the heart
that leads (in a regularly employed inverse but complementary metaphor) to
increasing depth (Scheler 1973, 345–9). There is simultaneously a deepening
contentment and an ongoing restlessness directed upward. Similar conditions
exist in the other regions of the spiritual. But the exclusive search for pleasurable
satisfaction leads to emptiness and a restlessness without positive direction.
There is a basic distinction between the love that sets up the individual’s
ordo amoris and the love for an individual person. Love as basic orientation
is not so much a virtue as it is the informing spirit of the virtues, “the mother
of spirit and reason” (Scheler 1972a, 111). In genuine love, there is a new and
deeper awakening to values in general made possible by the dispositions of
humility and reverence (Hildebrand 2009, 77). They turn the person away from
him- or herself and the merely subjectively satisfying toward what demands
proper response.
But in the primary sense, love is for another person (Hildebrand 2009,
15). We cannot will ourselves into such love; it is essentially a gift; in fact, the
higher the value, the more it has a gift-character (Hildebrand 1953, 319). Von
Hildebrand privileges “falling in love” that has to be distinguished from sexual
fixation and infatuation. He calls it “spousal love,” the love that calls one to
marriage and sets up a deep harmony between those so privileged (Hildebrand
2009, 301–4). Such love involves a desire for union with, and an orientation of
benevolence toward the beloved, a transcendence of self, and donation to the
other (17). Love is the voice of the heart whose clear vision is distinct from
the blindness involved in infatuation (54; Scheler 1972a, 116). True love opens
one’s eyes to the preciousness and beauty of the other (Hildebrand 2009, 22).
 Virtues, Values, and the Heart 139

Whereas infatuation is episodic, true love calls for commitment (26). Properly
cultivated, love keeps growing (like other deep value-responses); but just as in
relation to other values, routinization stunts or stops its growth (39). And like
deepened response to any value, growth in love for a person makes one sensitive
to all value-orders.
“Falling in love” involves the stirring of the passions; the heart is moved most
deeply. As distinct from passing episodes, passions for Scheler have a kind of
permanent binding prior to choice determined by one’s lived Weltanschauung
(Scheler 1973, 47). Such binding may be positive or negative. In the tradition,
they are called passions because we are passive to them, and they are traditionally
viewed as negative (Hildebrand 2007, 34). But Scheler, with Hegel, finds passion
also in the holistic way one can be taken over by a worthy project. “Nothing
great,” they both say, “is achieved without passion” (Scheler 1972a, 131; Hegel
2007, §447).
There is a sense in which even negative passions may lead to keen discernment.
The pride, ambition, and hatred of Shakespeare’s Richard III made him acutely
aware of the situations that fostered or inhibited his aims and the ways in which
he might reach his ends; but they blinded him to the value of the persons that
stood in his way. In this regard, Plato distinguished the intelligence of the wise
from that of the clever.
For von Hildebrand, the real antithesis to the inauthentic modes of feeling is
“the genuine feeling of a noble and deep heart” that has allowed itself to be moved
by love or sublime beauty in nature or in art or by some moral value, like chastity
or humility, and “to be penetrated by the inner light of these values” (Hildebrand
2007, 10). He further remarks that “our engagement with a value elevates us,
liberates us from self-centeredness, reposes us in a transcendent order which is
independent of us, of our moods, of our dispositions” (Hildebrand 1953, 36).

Virtues and their ground

It is through the acquisition of virtues that the concrete orientation of the heart
receives the power to perceive and to act in response to positive value. For von
Hildebrand, virtues are “the lasting qualities of a person’s character,” “the very
core of morality.” They spell themselves out in the sphere of action and the sphere
of concrete responses, “above all the affective responses.” Indeed, he claims that
“the backbone of every virtue is a superactual value response” operative from the
heart (Hildebrand 1953, 342–3).
140 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

For Scheler, virtue is an enduring character rooted in the heart. A virtue

is always immediately available, gushing forth in action as the spontaneous
and joyful power of will in response to value. Its endurance is living and thus
developing, being refracted through the individual value-essence of the person
(Scheler 1972b, 15). It is “the immediately experienced power to do something
that ought to be done” (Scheler 1973, 205). The action that follows is a self-
manifestation, not only to others, but also to oneself. “The person is given,”
Scheler says, “only when a being-able-to-do is present (to oneself and others) as
a simple phenomenal fact” (480). Through virtue we live on a deeper, superactual
level that is one with happiness.
Scheler rejects the traditional classification of virtues as habits. In every
positive moral act, the virtue of the person increases—something “different
than the habituation and practice of actions related to the virtue in question”
(Scheler 1973, 537). As a moral ability to do, virtue is superactually present
in all experience: one carries definite modes of sensitivity to value as regular
features of one’s life, so that—to the extent that the virtue in question has
penetrated to the core of the person—one is honest or reverent or appreciative
of beauty or benevolent always. The deeper the superactuality penetrates
the heart of the agent, the broader and more sensitive is the attention to the
corresponding values.
Scheler argues against Kant who measured the value of virtue in terms of
the cost it takes to secure and practice it; he argues together with Aristotle and
Aquinas, who located the higher levels of the attainment of virtue in the ease
with which the corresponding acts can be executed (Scheler 1973, 228–30). To
the extent that virtue pervades the person, the acts that stem from the heart will
cost him no effort; they will be spontaneous and joyful. For von Hildebrand,
ease in acting virtuously is the fruit of the superabundance of love (Hildebrand
1953, 374).
In contrast to the eudaemonist tradition, for Scheler, happiness can never
be a goal or purpose of willing and acting. In fact, “. . . happiness is the root and
source of virtue, a fountainhead, although it is only a consequence of the inner
goodness of the person” (Scheler 1973, 359). “Only the happy person acts in a
morally good way.” Of course, this raises the question of how one gets to be such
a happy person (Blosser 1995, 111–12). We will return to that question later.
With regard to the spontaneity and joyfulness that stem from the practice of
a deeply absorbed virtue, Scheler approvingly cites Spinoza: “Blissfulness is not
the reward of virtue; it is virtue itself ” (Scheler 1973, 235). Scheler claims that
“Only the good person is blissful” (359). He further claims that “. . . all feelings
 Virtues, Values, and the Heart 141

of happiness and unhappiness have their foundation in feelings of values.” This

is perhaps why he considers the agreeable or von Hildebrand’s “subjectively
satisfying” as a mode of value since there is a kind of happiness involved, however
superficial and fleeting.
Von Hildebrand distinguishes virtues from capacities, abilities, and
temperamental dispositions (Hildebrand 1953, 357–74). Capacities are native
powers—like knowing, willing, sensing—that belong to human beings as such.
Abilities like that of the pianist, the typist, and the golfer, once acquired, remain
latent and without effect on the rest of our lives until we choose to employ
them. On the contrary, as we noted, virtues involve an alertness to value that
accompanies all wakeful life.
Von Hildebrand calls attention to another kind of endowment that might be
confused with virtue: dispositions characteristic of a given temperament. One
might be weak in instinctive life and thus adapted for spirituality, gentleness,
patience, modesty, and the like. Those with stronger instinctive life are adapted
for courage, fidelity to truth, and unreserved devotion to the good (Hildebrand
1953, 363ff). But to develop these tendencies into genuine virtues requires being
informed by the perception of, and the positive, “superactual” response to,
values that can only be developed over time. That involves the orientation of “the
loving, reverent, value-responding center” (Scheler 1973, 374). One learns to
rise above temperament and cultivate not only those temperamentally cognate
virtues, but also those virtues that are not native to a given temperament. Saints
are models of virtue who rise above their temperamental proclivities to exhibit
equally both sets of virtues (370).
Habit can also mean routine, in which case value responses are dulled,
as often in martial relations and in religious practice. Though routines are
necessary in certain areas of our lives, the routinization of those areas of our
lives that call for a deepening value-response poses a serious danger. Without an
inner alertness suffused with reverence and humility that ground what Gabriel
Marcel has called “creative fidelity” (Marcel 1964), our inner relation to the
bearers of the values in question flattens and we are in danger of going dead
inside. Von Hildebrand goes so far as to say that “to be a prey to habit, instead
of responding to the value or disvalue of an object, is, as such, even something
morally negative” (Scheler 1973, 373).
Though not habits as routines or competencies, for Scheler, virtues are not
acquired by willing or even by practicing the acts meant to exhibit a given virtue.
Virtue for Scheler is a “surplus” not striven for, a free gift of grace: though value
calls to our free spiritual center, our efforts are only preparatory (Scheler 1972b,
142 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

16). For Scheler, the question of grace is given through a combination of natural
proclivities, tradition, right forms of education, and authority (Scheler 1973, 80).
As every person experiences himself against the background of the whole of
experience and other things against the background of a spatially and temporally
endless nature, so also he experiences himself as a member of a community that
encompasses him and within which he meets models of virtue and vice (519).
Though there may be exceptions, for von Hildebrand, virtue typically requires
“time for taking root in the good, for permitting values to fecundate our soul,
to penetrate every fiber of our personality.” As with Scheler, he notes that a
good environment, the “irradiation of a great and morally noble personality,”
or sharing great experiences in common are aids in one’s growth in virtue
(Hildebrand 1953, 376).
So, for both thinkers, the transformative gift is mediated through models
(Scheler 1973, 328–9, 580). Scheler calls attention to models in different orders
that appear in the various modes of community: in declining order, he cites saint,
leading spirit, genius, hero, bon vivant (585; Frings 1997, 72–80). This is linked to
Scheler’s observation that virtues are directly visible in the conduct of exemplary
individuals, for the virtue has penetrated into the root of action. Just as one
sees anger or love in another, so one sees the aura of the ruling virtues of the
exemplary other. The ability to see and be moved to emulate involves breaking
through one’s stereotypical way of glancing, categorizing, and responding. The
models have the power to evoke the desire to emulate in those that are ready. That
is why some authorities have great power, though they use no force: consider the
religious founders whose power of example and teaching rule literally billions of
people through thousands of years (Scheler 1973, 234).
Given Scheler’s emphasis upon the uniqueness of the person, one would not
suspect that for him, solidarity is primary. It is realized through “the feelings
of sympathy that belong originally and naturally to all life” (Scheler 1973, 279).
The person grows in personhood through its relation with the Thou (389–90).
The break with solidarity through egoism is based upon a reduction and is a
disease (278–9). He goes so far as to say that each person is responsible for all
the others (196).
Scheler distinguishes society and community. Society is based upon contract,
but both life-community and community of persons grow up over time and
constitute the lifeworld for a people within which contracts are possible. The
higher forms of community are the cultural forms based upon the spiritual
values of the esthetic and the intellectual, for which the genius is the model,
and upon moral values for which the leading spirit is the model. The religious
 Virtues, Values, and the Heart 143

community is based upon the holy, incarnate in the saint. Scheler stresses that
following a model involves neither obedience nor imitation but contacting the
same inner source ruling in the exemplary person (Scheler 1973, 580).
We have pointed several times to the roots of the kind of experience that
evokes transformation: they lie in two peculiar and closely related virtues that
are not on the usual lists in philosophy texts: humility and reverence. In his
article on the rehabilitation of virtue, Scheler privileges these two. Humility is a
form of openness that involves two basic parameters: the attempt to see oneself as
God sees, from which follows, second, preparedness to serve (Dienstbereitschaft)
(Scheler 1972b, 27). Humility involves the proper disposition to oneself and
openness to finding and following one’s obligations. Humility opens the eyes of
the heart for all values: even those found in such simple things as space and time,
light and air, sea and flowers (21).
Interestingly, both Scheler and von Hildebrand give special attention to the
esthetic realm as the fruit of humility and reverence because the esthetic in its
deepest mode is a way of being taken outside oneself. It stimulates a transference
of the sense of humility and reverence to the whole of one’s encounters. It is one
of the forms of spiritual experience.
Pride, of course, is the opposite of humility. Scheler, in what seems like an
excessive manner, goes so far as to characterize pride in one’s sovereignty and
worthiness in Kant and the Stoics as diabolic (teuflisch). However, he notes
that there is legitimate pride in one’s accomplishments and one’s family insofar
as it is built upon love for the things about which one is proud. But absolute
pride in the naked, empty I is hell, the place of lack of love: that is diabolic
(Scheler 1972b, 18–19). For von Hildebrand, pride isolates and divides people
from one another (Hildebrand 1953, 371). He sees false pride in the closure and
hostility of the conservative temperament in relation to whatever might appear
as different (110).
Scheler sees a parallel between humility and truth. The way of losing the
proud self and living in God’s presence involves intuition in the intellectual
order, moving from relishing one’s own opinions to an openness to that which
measures our claims. That is directly parallel to humility in the ethical order. In
both orders it is “in losing our life that we gain it.” Self-lowering here involves
gift from above and a sense of fullness (Scheler 1972b, 23–5).
The second virtue Scheler treats is reverence. Though horizon and perspective is
the law of all finite spirits, reverence gives us the correct perspective. The reverent
can see what the irreverent cannot: “the mystery of things and the world-depth of
their existence,” a feature involved in humility as well (Scheler 1972b, 27).
144 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

Von Hildebrand offers parallel observations: Humility, he says, “is alive in all
virtue”; it is “the attitude which is the foundation of all virtue. . . .” Humility
makes possible responsiveness to the whole field of value (Hildebrand 1990b,
155–6). But, as we noted above, he also claims that reverence for the dignity of
being as such is “the mother of all virtues and all religion” (Hildebrand 1970,
43). Humility is the foundation, reverence is the mother of virtues. What is the
difference?
In von Hildebrand’s work on Fundamental Moral Attitudes, reverence is
first (Hildebrand 1969, 1–15). It is the attitude that opens the spiritual eyes for
the apprehension of values and creates the space for their unfolding. It is “the
disposition to recognize something superior to one’s arbitrary pleasure and
will, and to be ready to subordinate and abandon oneself.” In fact, reverence
is “the superactual response to the dignity of being as such” (361). Reverence
in the depths correlates with our primordial orientation toward the Whole via
the notion of being. In “this silent, contemplative disposition toward being as
being, the world begins to disclose itself in its entire depth, differentiation, and
plenitude of value.” Reverence, he says further, is “the . . . basic presupposition
for the genuineness, the beauty, and the truth of all virtue” (Hildebrand 1990b,
149; 1990a, 36). Virtue in the most authentic sense of the term is permeated
by reverence. Such permeation presents the beauty of virtue as a radiance that
shines upon those who perceive it. Whatever virtues one might have, they have
their full truth in their being permeated by reverence.
The descriptions of humility and reverence offered by both thinkers suggest
their identity. But humility and reverence play opposite to pride and concupiscence
differently: humility is clearly the opposite of pride, reverence the opposite of both
pride and concupiscence. The human being is a battleground between the virtue
of humility and the vice of pride, between reverence and the lack of reverence
characteristic of following concupiscence and being improperly proud. Though
Scheler describes reverence as a virtue, von Hildebrand rather describes it as the
fundamental moral disposition that sustains the life of the virtues, as irreverence
is the disposition that sustains the life of vice. “The irreverent person is flat and
shallow, for he fails to understand the depth of being” (Hildebrand 1969, 15).
Reverence is the disposition through which love as primary orientation grows
in a positive direction.
For von Hildebrand, though one has to distinguish response to value in
particular realms from response to value generally that varies greatly from
person to person (Hildebrand 2009, 63), reverence that has deeply penetrated
the person leads to perception and response in one order—moral, esthetic,
 Virtues, Values, and the Heart 145

intellectual, or religious—and opens us up to all values. In being affected by

values we become internally more unified, more recollected (Hildebrand 1953,
288). This would involve the interpenetration of the esthetic, the intellectual, the
moral, and the religious, like the circumincession of the Beautiful, the True, and
the Good, grounded in the One that is the Holy.
For von Hildebrand, there is a family of virtues grounded in reverence:
he lists humility, justice, generosity, purity, and charity. Here reverence is the
ground of humility (Hildebrand 1953, 129). He also has an expanded notion of
justice: justice is the permanent disposition to give each what is due, not only in
the moral and religious orders, but also in the intellectual and esthetic orders
(361). Generosity flows from the depth of reverence. Purity is more than chastity
viewed simply as sexual continence: “Blessed are the pure of heart for they shall
see God” (Hildebrand 1970, 47). Von Hildebrand’s view of purity is not aligned
either with those who find sex disgusting or with those prudes who reject nudity
in art (57–8). Purity is concerned, above all, with reverence for the mystery of
sexuality (40). Charity, finally, is the love of one’s neighbor in God. The basic
disposition suffusing these virtues is reverence as openness and willingness to
give due response to what presents itself. What stands contrary to reverence is
pride and concupiscence.
Pride consists in determining one’s own measures and not allowing oneself
to be measured by any other standard. For von Hildebrand, “the proud man is
centered around his self-glory, the consciousness of his own importance and
excellence, and around his masterly sovereignty” (Hildebrand 1953, 441–52). One
dominated by concupiscence views things only insofar as they afford subjective
satisfaction. Von Hildebrand lists as types of concupiscence sexual license,
drunkenness, gluttony, sloth, and greed; he adds, somewhat unexpectedly, desire
for the sensational (431–40). One’s appetites blind one to value so that they are
not properly measured. But concupiscence can exclusively dominate a person
only insofar as it is supported by an element of pride.
There is an intermediate situation: that of the cultivated esthete for whom
sensory experiences are subjected to refinement but who turns everything into
an occasion for enjoyment. Von Hildebrand offers an interesting distinction
between such an esthete for whom the work of art is mere means for his refined
enjoyment and one who knows “the value-responding, reverent enjoying of the
artistically sensitive person” (Hildebrand 2009, 49). There might be the same
cultivation but a radically different disposition that reveals depths closed to
the mere esthete. There is a kind of value-blindness, even in the esthetic order,
when reverence and humility are missing (Hildebrand 2007, 10).
146 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

There is also the value-dimming stance of enjoying one’s fine state in the
presence of things of value—something noted by Scheler as well. Von Hildebrand
calls it “squinting” at oneself (Hildebrand 1953, 261). In so doing, one loses sight
of the value and misses out on the possible transforming character of proper
response.
Value-blindness is produced by habitual action against a value; it entails
lack of reverence toward the values involved (230). As one is introduced to the
virtues through what one encounters in one’s social environment, so also with
vices (110–11, 422). But, though certain forms of value-blindness are incarnate
in one’s culture, one has to learn to take responsibility for assimilating that into
one’s own life.

Conclusion

Scheler and von Hildebrand together have opened up new avenues for thought
regarding the virtues. They have grounded them in the heart that has its own
ordo amoris. They have indicated criteria for a hierarchy of values that can
measure the individual ordo amoris. The values correspond to the traditional
transcendental properties of Being. The virtues are linked to the ability to
give due response to the carriers of value; they occupy a superactual stratum
of one’s being that permeates one’s wakeful life. Decisively important for one’s
ordo amoris is the battle between humility and reverence on the one hand
and pride and concupiscence on the other. Humility and reverence turn one
to the objective order of things, pride, and concupiscence to one’s subjective
satisfaction. The latter produces value-blindness and leads to a lack of inner
contentment, the former to an ever-deepening sense of things. The key to the
fully virtuous life is reverence.

Notes

1 For Scheler’s title, Formalism in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik, Manfred
Frings’ translation of materiale Wertethik as “Non-Formal Ethics” suffers from
clumsy indirection. Materiale plays over against Formalismus as “matter” to
“form,” where the former term here refers to content. Hence my translation.
2 References to Aristotle in this chapter are to the text as it appears in:
Aristotle. 1975. On the Soul, trans. W. Hett. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
 9

The Self that Recedes:

A Phenomenology of Virtue
J. Jeremy Wisnewski

Providing a phenomenology of virtue might well seem presumptuous. If one

is not a moral sage oneself (a phronimos), on what basis can one construct a
phenomenology of virtue? Fortunately, even those who fall short of virtue have
access to its phenomenology. Descriptions of the experience of virtue are no more
difficult to find than theoretical accounts of it. To capture the phenomenology
of virtue, then, we will need to rely on the core features of virtue found in
descriptions of it—both theoretical and practical. Any phenomenology of virtue
will be answerable to these descriptions. An adequate phenomenology of virtue
will capture the core theoretical commitments of virtue ethics, making such
commitments experientially resonant, and illuminating those descriptions of
the experience of virtue we find in a wide variety of sources.
There is perhaps no more famous or influential account of virtue than the
one we find in Aristotle. My aim in what follows is to provide a phenomenology
of virtue that captures the core features of Aristotle’s account of the phronimos.
Although it is certainly possible that Aristotle is wrong about the features of
a virtuous life, one must begin somewhere—and Aristotle’s account of virtue,
whatever its faults, remains one of the most persuasive and robust available
to us.
I take the following to be core elements of Aristotle’s account of virtue, and
hence as those things any phenomenology of virtue must acknowledge: first,
virtue involves perception, not merely judgment; second, virtue is autotelic,
valuable for its own sake; third, virtue is not the same as knowledge; fourth,
virtue crucially involves the emotions; finally, virtue involves experiencing the
world in a non-egocentric way—it involves what I will call a “recessive self.”
148 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

My task in what follows will be to provide a model of perception that both

makes Aristotle’s view plausible and reveals something about the structure of
virtuous experience. I will begin by presenting an enactivist view of perception
rooted in J. J. Gibson’s (1979) notion of affordances. I will argue that perception
is constituted fundamentally by a recognition of the possible actions available to
an acting agent. I will refine this account by arguing that moods and emotions
further perceptually delineate possible actions. The phenomenology of virtue, I
contend, is best understood on the model of attunement to those possibilities of
action characteristic of virtue. It is, I will argue, a kind of perceptual expertise
that shares several of the features of expert action generally: it is autotelic, self-
recessive, and largely nondeliberative. The way one comes to such experiences, I
will further argue, is crucial to their being what they are.

Perception, affordances, and virtue

Aristotle regarded moral expertise as fundamentally perceptual in character.

The morally wise person (phronimos), on Aristotle’s view, literally sees the
world differently:1 “[Phronesis] is of the ultimate particular, of which there is
not scientific knowledge but perception—not sensory perception, but like the
perception whereby we perceive that the triangle is the ultimate particular in
geometry” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1142a27–9).2 To become virtuous is thus to
alter the way the world is disclosed. My first task in providing a phenomenology
of virtue is to provide a model for how we might understand this claim in more-
or-less literal terms.
The crucial distinction that Aristotle invokes in claiming that phronesis
is perceptual is a distinction between perceiving and judging. Phronetic
knowledge is perceptual because it is not the result of conscious judgment.3
Perception is immediate; judgment is not. Thus, to claim that the phronimos
perceives moral facts is not to say that the phronimos makes the correct
judgments about the facts once those facts are perceived. Indeed, judgments
(at least of the conscious sort) are precisely what Aristotle wants to rule out
when discussing phronesis.
What, then, is phronetic perception a perception of ? If we begin with a
passive view of perception (like a sense-data theory)—where we merely soak up
the neutral world around us—we will not get far in adequately answering this
question. I thus propose to begin with the premise that perception is enactive—
that it is fundamentally constituted through a purposive embodied intelligence
 The Self that Recedes 149

dynamically engaging in the world around it. On this view, perception is not
best understood as the raw data-acquisition of a being with sensory organs.
Rather, perception can be characterized as the recognition of affordances—as
the perception of possibilities of action within a situation. Affordances can be
either basic or acquired. To perceive an object is to recognize something that
can be manipulated: something that can be held, or thrown, or stood upon. As
I will argue, the core of virtue—of phronetic perception—is training oneself to
have those emotional states which allow one to perceive the appropriate range of
possible actions within situations.
The core idea of perception as enaction is captured in Merleau-Ponty’s
claim that consciousness is not a matter of thinking, but of acting. To be aware
of the world is to be aware of one’s possibilities for acting within that world.
Perception is, then, never neutral—it is always intrinsically linked to the kind
of being engaged in perception as well as the possibilities open to the specific
entity perceiving the world. At the most basic level of perception, we find what I
will call primary affordances: a range of possible actions and movements that are
made possible by one’s biology—the possession of arms and legs, or echolocation,
or sensitivity to color, to take some rather obvious examples. On this view of
perception, what one perceives is always indexed to (and made possible by) a
world of possible action, and this world is structured in terms of the kinds of
perceptual capacities a given organism has. By contrast, secondary affordances
are those action-possibilities that are acquired by training, and which further
delineate the perceptual world of an organism.
What is disclosed to a tick, to borrow an example from Jakob Uexküll (2010),
will not be identical to what is disclosed to a human being. Ticks perceive the
presence of butyric acid, and this exhausts their perceptual world. The perception
of butyric acid marks the realm of possible action for the tick—when such acid is
detected, the tick recognizes it is time to fall from its place in a tree (e.g.) in order
to attach to the mammal it detects. Humans, of course, perceive a great many
more possibilities than the tick, but the example is important nonetheless: on this
model of perception, perception is fundamentally structured in terms of action
and is to be understood as applying to any organism that perceives. Indeed, on
this view, perception just is the perception of possible modes of action; hence,
anything that can be said to perceive perceives in terms of possible action within
the world. Affordances, on this view, are perceptually basic.
None of this yet explains why perceptions differ. Human beings share a primary
set of affordances. Why, then, do we not all perceive exactly the same action
possibilities across situations? The answer to this question is straightforward
150 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

and already well developed in the literature on virtue ethics: perception can be
trained. Obviously, there are a great many ways this can happen. Through trial
and error with a competent mentor, humans can come to be able to immediately
identify aspects of their perceptual environment that were formerly hidden to
them: one can taste things in wine that were unavailable before, or hear musical
intervals that would otherwise go unnoticed. One can likewise learn to identify
the sex of newborn chickens at a glance, despite the inability to articulate exactly
what differences one is noticing.
Aristotle identifies emotional perception as crucial to moral action and much
of the literature in virtue ethics follows suite. Rather than trying to articulate
the many kinds of perception that can be developed, then, I will concentrate
on emotional perception—the very thing Aristotle regards as the core of
the so-called “moral virtues,” and the very thing that he identifies as being
transformed through habituation. To round out my account of affordances, I
will sketch the sense in which emotions themselves can be understood as the
perception of possible actions.
Emotions (broadly construed) constitute a means by which particular
affordances stand out in our perceptual environment. Love reveals things in a
particular way, disclosing not just the thing loved but also how we should relate
to that thing. Depression, likewise, can rob our affordances of their worth: to be
depressed is to no longer see a wide range of actions as worth pursuing. Because
emotions are not merely the subjective froth atop all perception—because they
partially constitute what we perceive—there is no such thing as an emotionless
perception (“Dasein always has its mood,” as Heidegger says).4 Our emotions
are constitutive elements of what particular affordances are revealed to us in
any particular instance. Sadness can prevent us from recognizing particular
action-opportunities or lead to us seeing these opportunities as not worth
pursuing. Anger can likewise lead certain action-opportunities to dominate our
perceptual field. In rage, one sees what ought to be done in a way qualitatively
distinct from other emotions. Indeed, part of what it means to be enraged is to
perceive certain affordances and not others: smashing an object stands out as a
possible action when I am enraged in a way that it simply does not when I am in
a mood of calm detachment.
Emotions are neither entirely passive nor merely subjective. We are not
merely slaves to our emotions, nor are our emotions merely internal states of a
mind trying to represent the world. Moods and emotions register changes in the
environment. On the James-Lange theory of emotion, we should understand an
 The Self that Recedes 151

emotion itself as a means by which the body prepares for action. Emotions are
thus always related to a world and responsive to it. Moreover, we can learn to be
less likely to experience a given emotion (rage, depression, or even love). This
means that emotions are both cognitive in the broad sense that they tell us about
the world we inhabit and responsive to training.
The model of affordances allows us to understand virtue itself as perceptual
in character. When one acquires phronesis, one sees what a particular situation
demands and responds accordingly. This is achieved through the appropriate
kind of training of the emotions. All perception is to be understood as perception
of action-possibilities. The virtuous person perceives the world differently
precisely because she sees the range of possible actions more perspicuously
and immediately than the nonvirtuous person does. Emotions themselves, as
perceptual, reveal action possibilities: sympathy reveals the possibility of a loving
response; anger reveals the possibility of aggressive action, and so on. What is to
be done and what can be done appear to the phronimos in the right way because
the phronimos has trained herself to have the right emotions in the right ways
and at the right times.

Flow experience: Expertise and moral action

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work on “optimal experience” (flow experience)

provides several clues to the structure of a phenomenology of virtue that
recognizes virtue as a kind of expertise.5 In Flow: The Psychology of Optimal
Experience, Csikszentmihalyi argues that there are eight distinct features of flow
experience.

First, the experience usually occurs when we confront tasks which we have a
chance of completing. Second, we must be able to concentrate on what we are
doing. Third and fourth, the concentration is usually possible because the task
undertaken has clear goals and provides immediate feedback. Fifth, one acts with
a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and
frustrations of everyday life. Sixth, enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise
a sense of control over their actions. Seventh, concern for the self disappears, yet
paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over.
Finally, the sense of the duration of time is altered. (Csikszentmihalyi 1991, 49)

Although Csikszentmihalyi’s aim is to excavate the phenomenology of

enjoyment—of experiences that people find most satisfying—his analysis has
152 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

an immediate relevance to discussions of virtuous action in general and to the

actions of the phronimos in particular. What characterizes flow experience, as
we will see, is an absorption in one’s activity that navigates between experiences
one finds too challenging, and hence overwhelming, on the one hand, and those
experiences one finds too easy, and hence not worthy of our attention, on the
other. In a flow experience, an agent is challenged in a way that does not exceed
her competence but which calls upon her to utilize all of the expertise in her
possession. Flow experiences, in Csikszentmihalyi’s study, are found in a wide
range of activities: rock-climbing, playing a musical instrument, reading, and
social interaction all admit of something like an expertise, where one exercises
one’s competence in a way that is absorbing and which focuses one’s energies on
the task at hand. When one is involved in such experiences, Csikszentmihalyi
argues, one is no longer weighed on by the demands of the self. That is, the
normal questions that occur to most persons regarding their abilities, their
course of action, the appropriateness of their desires, and so on, are eclipsed by
an experience that fully concentrates their attention on the task at hand.
Flow experience, then, always presupposes a prior competence in the action in
which one is involved. In playing chess, for example, thoughts about whether or
not one will win the game, or about one’s ability to play the game well, uniformly
disrupt one’s immersion in the game. The expert chess player will play most
effectively to the extent that she is able to set aside all such issues involving the
self and fully concentrate on exercising her competence within the game.
Admittedly, for an expert activity, whether typical or esoteric, a good deal of
training is required before such kinds of experiences are possible. In learning to
play the piano, for example, one will find obstacles to immersion in the activity
of playing at nearly every turn: one’s fingers do not follow one’s intentions; one
has to reflect on the notes represented in the sheet music one is attempting
to play; one may find even the simplest musical exercises taxing, as they aim
to stretch one’s competence. Similarly, learning to read, or to play a sport, or to
drive an automobile, takes significant time and energy in which one will have to
concentrate on what one is doing—usually following specific rules which, until
completely internalized, will impede one’s ability to immerse oneself completely
in the activity in question (see Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1990).
Flow experience, then, is not automatically available for any activity. What
counts as effectively being able to engage in the activity is coming to develop a
competence—coming to a point where one no longer needs to think about the
pedagogical rules one has thus far followed. Indeed, one might even recognize
that the rules will sometimes need to be broken. When one has acquired a
 The Self that Recedes 153

competence in an activity, absorption in the activity becomes possible and,

indeed, desirable. Rather than worrying about how well one is following the
rules, or what rules apply and in what way, the competent agent simply acts.
Action within a flow experience, as we have seen, is effortless and, in one
respect at least, nonreflective. This does not mean that, within flow experience,
there is never any thought. The chess player may think a great deal about how
to proceed—indeed, this may well be part of her competence. The reflection in
question, however, is always reflection within an activity rather than reflection
about it. If one needs to reflect on how the bishop moves, or on whether or not
one is doing a good job of following the rules, then by definition, one is not yet a
competent player of the game.
The model of flow experience provides us with a useful way of understanding
some of the core features of virtuous action, at least as articulated by Aristotle.
First, as Aristotle insists, the virtuous person experiences pleasure in acting
virtuously.6 Second, as Aristotle suggests, while the virtuous person does
require some kind of knowledge of what he is doing, this knowledge is the “least
important” feature of virtuous action. Third, in acting virtuously, the virtuous
agent does what he does for its own sake. Finally, for an action to be virtuous, it
must flow from a firm and unchanging character.
Csikszentmihalyi’s work, as I’ve indicated, endeavors to understand the core
features of enjoyment. The upshot of his research is precisely that enjoyment is
constituted by optimal (or flow) experiences. If virtue is a techne—if it involves
a kind of expertise—we should expect, as Aristotle rightly insists, that the
virtuous person will enjoy acting virtuously.7 If the skill in question is a skill
that is fundamentally about praxis rather than episteme—about action rather
than abstract knowledge—one’s ability to articulate what one sees in a given
situation, or to articulate what justifies one course of action over another,
will necessarily be secondary to the ability to act in the right way to begin
with. Analogously, an expert pianist may not be able to say all that much
about how to move your fingers as rapidly and with the precision that he has
attained, but this would hardly mean he was not an expert pianist. In such
cases, of course, the expert will have a practical knowledge of how to proceed
competently, but may lack the ability to articulate this competence in necessary
and sufficient conditions. Virtue, as Aristotle forcefully argues, is not the same
as knowledge.
We have also seen that flow experience is autotelic. This is not an incidental
feature of such experiences. On the contrary, it is only in autotelic experiences
that one can become fully absorbed in one’s activity. If one is constantly concerned
154 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

with goals external to one’s practice, one will never achieve flow experiences
within that practice.8
Finally, a flow experience allows us to understand the important connection
between competence and action that characterizes expert engagement. A lousy
pianist might accidently play a brilliant phrase; an incompetent chess player may
inadvertently mate an opponent. Flow experience occurs when competence is
exercised against the right level of challenge. Without such competence, flow
within a practice is unattainable. The virtuous person acts virtuously precisely
because she has developed the required abilities. One cannot be virtuous
accidentally, much as one cannot be a great chess player accidentally, despite the
fact that lousy players might occasionally make good moves, and vicious people
may occasionally do things that we regard as the right thing to do. To properly
call these expert actions would require that they flow from the right kind of
understanding, in the right way, at the right time, and so on.
What I have said so far, I hope, is sufficient for demonstrating the fruitfulness
of the model of perception of affordances, on the one hand, and flow experience,
on the other, in understanding the sense in which virtue can be argued to be a
kind of perceptual expertise (techne). First, phronesis is literally perceptual—it
involves possessing emotional states in such a way that one will recognize the
distinct action-possibilities required by virtue. Second, one must be habituated
into phronesis—our perception of affordances must be trained by training
ourselves to have the appropriate emotional reactions to the world around us,
lest our emotions blind us to the proper actions in a given context. Third, once
expertise is attained, virtue becomes its own reward—that is, as a flow experience,
it is autotelic. Fourth, deliberation about how to be virtuous and the reliance on
rules for how to be virtuous are no longer necessary. One may well deliberate
about how best to act, but such deliberation will be within phronetic perception
rather than about it.

The recession of the self in virtuous action

The central claim

The core features of flow experience, as we have seen, are that it is autotelic,
nondeliberative, and self-recessive. The latter feature requires some discussion
if it is to be properly understood. To say that the “self ” recedes is not to say that
it is given no thought or concern. Recession need not mean absence. The point
 The Self that Recedes 155

is rather that the self does not dominate one’s perception of a situation. Aristotle
argues that an appropriate interest in the self is crucial to the deliberation
of the phronimos. Interestingly, one’s “care for the self ” in this case is nearly
impossible to mistake for self-obsession. It would be more accurate to say that
one is required to care for selves, in Aristotle’s view, but one’s own self is not any
more important than that of, say, one’s friend (a “second self,” Aristotle notes).9
What is this “self ” that recedes? By “self ” I do not mean self-consciousness.
To say the self recedes is not to say that in such experience there is no self-
consciousness. Our experiences of the world may well necessarily involve an
experience of something like a self.10 The claim that phronetic perception is
self-recessive is agnostic on this issue: awareness of our agency may or may
not be implicit in all of our perceptions and actions. By “self ” I thus do not
mean anything like “agency” simpliciter. Rather, I mean to pick out two specific
(related) things: first, the set of self-regarding interests that most of us consider
as we engage in normal action; second, the bearer of those interests which we
construct in thinking about these self-regarding interests.
A self-regarding interest, as I am using the phrase, has two qualities: first, it
is an interest that one has simply in virtue of being the person one is; second,
it is an interest that I have specifically because I perceive it as benefitting me.
My interest in winning the lottery is specifically about my winning the lottery,
not about just anyone winning. I have that interest precisely because I would
benefit from winning the lottery. There are two natural contrasts to this class
of interests: other-regarding interests, on the one hand, and non-self-regarding
interests, on the other. I have genuine interests in the happiness of my wife, for
example. I likely would not have such interests if I did not know my wife (so
the interest does depend on me being the person I am). The interest is not self-
regarding, however, because I do not have the interest solely because I perceive
my wife’s happiness as benefitting me. Rather, I have an interest in my wife’s
happiness—an other-regarding interest—because I love her and care about
her well-being. My interest in preserving the natural environment, to provide
a different example, would be neither a self-regarding nor an other-regarding
interest. I value the natural environment for its own sake (not because it benefits
me specifically). Moreover, my interest in the preservation of the environment
has little to do with the person I happen to be (the interest is not essentially
constituted by my having a particular identity). This interest, then, is non-self-
regarding.
Given the above characterization of self-regarding interests, then, what does it
mean to say that virtue involves the recession of the self? In claiming that virtue
156 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

is self-recessive, as the above distinctions make clear, we are not claiming that
phronesis involves only the consideration of what might be called “universal”
interests by some ideal rational agent.11
In phronesis, I still have interests, and some of these interests depend
crucially on who I am. The fact that I am a father, a husband, a teacher situates
me in a set of relationships, each of which involves attendant moral demands.
To be a (good) father means to have interests in my children’s well-being and
to have these interests even if they entail sacrificing other interests that might
directly benefit me. Who I am, then, is not irrelevant to what my obligations
are. Phronesis still involves other-regarding interests—ones that depend on the
particular identity I have. The reason I have such interests, though, is not to be
found in the fact that the interests benefit me.
How, then, are we to characterize a phenomenology in which self-
regarding interests are dominant? The idea of the self seems to emerge out
of reflection, as a narrative construction.12 This does not entail, however, that
the self only enters one’s phenomenological field in moments of reflection.
Thoughts about the self (and self-regarding interests) can be immediate in
one’s phenomenology. In such cases, one sees the world and privileges one’s
own narratively constructed self in that world. One sees through one’s self-
regarding interests. This point does not require belief in anything like a
protean self. On this view, rather, the self is entirely (or perhaps only largely)
constructed in the narrative space one uses to understand one’s life. But the
self so constructed comes to dominate one’s experiential world. In confronting
a situation, the realm of possible actions open to me is constrained and
informed by those things that will directly harm or benefit me. In the normal
experience of most people, I hypothesize, the presence of such self-regarding
interests is the norm—though we should also admit that it is rare for such
interests to be the only kind any particular agent has. Our normal experience
of situations involves seeing our possibilities of action within the situation in
terms informed by what we prereflectively believe will be optimal for us, given
who we are. This does not mean that something like psychological egoism is
true. It means, rather, that, in normal experience, certain affordances stand
out over others precisely because these affordances have a direct bearing on
our state-of-being in the world. This is not to say that normal people always
do those things that they perceive as beneficial to them; it is to say, rather, that
these possibilities of action are often the most obvious to us, even if we opt not
to choose them.
 The Self that Recedes 157

It is precisely this, I think, that marks one change in the phenomenology of

the phronimos: the phronimos no longer experiences things in such terms; the
place of the self is no longer such that those actions that will most benefit it stand
as the most obvious possibilities of action. To reiterate: the claim here is that such
self-regarding interests recede, not that they disappear. The phronimos need not
lose the ability to recognize what actions would most benefit her. Indeed, part of
the wisdom of phronesis is precisely that one does see such actions for what they
are. The claim is that these affordances no longer have the same phenomenological
primacy and urgency that they do in most of us, most of the time.
In expertise generally, one’s self recedes and one is absorbed into the world
one encounters. One is affectively engaged in that world to such an extent
that other concerns do not present themselves—or, at any rate, do not present
themselves so pressingly. Virtue, I have argued, has precisely this character. The
self is there and can reemerge at any moment, but it is recessed. What concerns
one is not one’s self-regarding interests, but rather what is happening in the arena
of one’s concern—in the situation one encounters.
The phronimos experiences the world differently, and part of the structure
of this difference is in the place accorded to one’s self-regarding interests in
experience. The world of the phronimos is not one that is colonized by endless
thoughts of how something relates to these interests. He is not distracted by such
interests or by reflection on them. The phronimos has interests, it is true—and
these are vital to all moral deliberation and action—but these interests are much
wider than those of mere self-interest; their orbit does not have at its center the
ever-demanding ego. This is the core difference between normal self-recessive
expert action and virtuous expertise: most of our expert action, most of the
time, can be characterized in terms of the presence of latent self-regarding
interests—ones that are not consciously present while I exercise my competence
(hence allowing flow experience), but which carve out the space of affordances
nevertheless. As I decide to play chess, or learn to play the piano, I do so against
a background of understanding in which my self-regarding interests loom large.
It is precisely this, I am claiming, that changes in the phenomenology of the
phronimos.

Evidence for the claim

My discussion thus far has aimed to make it clear what it means to say that the
self recedes in virtuous action. I have not yet given any explicit arguments for the
158 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

view. What, then, is the evidence for the claim that the self is indeed recessive in
the phenomenology of virtue? At least two arguments can be given.

1. Flow experience in general is self-recessive. If we can use flow experience as

a model of virtue, virtue will possess this characteristic as well, even though
it will differ in detail.
2. A great many descriptions of virtuous action and the virtuous person
describe precisely this characteristic of moral experience.

The first argument, I think, requires little comment. If flow experience captures
the structural features of virtue, we have at least some evidence that virtue is
self-recessive. The evidence, of course, is inconclusive. After all, it may well be
the case that virtuous experience has most, but not all, of the features normally
associated with flow. This, however, is hardly surprising. Any description of
the phenomenology of virtue must, at the end of the day, be answerable to the
experiences themselves. In describing flow experience as being autotelic, we
recognize a standard feature of virtue. It is this recognition that makes the model
of flow experience a probable one, and not the other way around. To determine
whether or not virtue involves the recession of the self, then, we ultimately
have recourse only to what the experiences of virtue themselves present. Given
that few would be willing to claim themselves as moral sages, we are left with
examining the descriptions of virtuous experience offered by others. For those
seeking a logical proof of the claim I am defending here, this will undoubtedly
fall short of the mark. For the phenomenologist, however, this is exactly what we
ought to expect.13
This basic idea—that the self is not given excessive deliberative weight and
that it is not dominant in one’s perception of a situation—is one that we find
enshrined in every major moral theory. The utilitarian demands that we treat
our own interests as of no more moment than anyone else’s. Kant demands
that we never make an exception of ourselves and that we recognize how much
self-obsession can blind us to our own motivations. The danger is so great,
in fact, that Kant even claims it is impossible to know with certainty our own
motivations for any action. The self (or, perhaps more accurately, obsession
with oneself) is a central source of moral error. Learning to put oneself in one’s
place, so to speak, is a central concern for ethics in general.
But the pedigree for this view is broader than just Western philosophy.
The Christian imperative to “love thy neighbor as thy self ” also recognizes
our tendency to be motivated by a bloated sense of our own importance.
 The Self that Recedes 159

A recognition of this tendency is also (arguably) what’s behind many meditative

practices—particularly those that aim to get one to see that the “self ” is illusory.
Indeed, demonstrating that the self recedes in proper moral experience has been
a hallmark of virtually every moral tradition—from East to West. In fact, I know
of no religious tradition in which one cannot find precisely this point.
In The Varieties of Religious Experience, moreover, William James finds
precisely what we are calling the recession of the self in the descriptions of
saints throughout the Western religious traditions, not just in the descriptions
offered by theologians and philosophers.14 If we make the modest assumption
that the term “saint” is meant to be a moral designation quite close to the
term phronimos, then James’ study offers us a treasure-trove of supporting
evidence: based on dozens of available descriptions of saintly experience, James
characterizes the saint as someone with “a feeling of being in a wider life than
that of this world’s selfish little interests” and as someone who can experience
“an immense elation and freedom, as the outlines of the confining selfhood
melt down” (James 1985, 273). In the saint, moreover, James claims there is
“a shifting of the emotional centre towards loving and harmonious affections,
towards ‘yes, yes,’ and away from ‘no,’ where the claims of the non-ego are
concerned” (273).
Saintliness, in James’ view, is not necessarily a phenomenon of religion—one
can have a saintly character without any attachment to one religion over another
(a good reason to read “saint,” at least as James uses it, as being very close to the
term “phronimos”). The core of this character is “an inborn genius for certain
emotions” (James 1985, 265)—an ability to feel and, hence, to see what others
cannot see, or cannot see without much strain. The saint, by contrast, is able to
simply act—“he is free of all that inner friction and nervous waste” (265).
James’ account of the saint, I am urging, verifies precisely those core features
of the phenomenology of virtue I have been discussing. The moral sage—the
very person James has in mind in his discussion of saintliness—is characterized
by a different kind of perception of the world and her actions within it. The
character of this perception is one where the standard self-regarding interests
that dominate our normal phenomenology “melt down”—where the self recedes
into the background of one’s phenomenological field and in which such recession
allows the world to appear in a new way. The saint (phronimos) experiences the
world differently and accomplishes this by maintaining a different attunement to
the world—by having, as James puts it, “an inborn genius for certain emotions”
(James 1985, 265).
160 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

I want to reiterate that my appeal to moral and religious traditions, on the one
hand, and James, on the other, is not to be understood on the model of deductive
proof. Whether or not the self is in fact recessive in the phenomenology of
virtue will not be decided by an appeal to authority, traditional or otherwise.
My aim in citing such evidence is largely confirmation rather than justification.
But I want to emphasize first that the appeal to such traditions should be
understood as an appeal to the lived experience of those who have participated
in them (not to doctrine or to dogma) and second that we should not expect
any investigation into the phenomenology of virtue to be founded on anything
other than the lived experience of agents. Put otherwise: if an appeal to lived
experience—whether enshrined in theory or not—will not count as evidence,
then nothing will.
Despite the significant evidence for the view that virtue involves the recession
of the self, we should not conclude that such a recession is sufficient for virtue.
First, as we have seen, flow experience in general is self-recessive. Second, and
more importantly, there are modes of experience that are both self-recessive
and the very epitome of the vicious.15 Thus, while I accept the view that the
dominance of self-regarding interests is a central source for much immoral
action, I do not accept the claim that any experience where self-regarding
interests are set aside will therefore be a virtuous one. The recession of self-
regarding interests, in other words, is a necessary feature of the phenomenology
of virtue, but it is not a sufficient one.

Conclusion

It is perhaps part of the nature of experience, as well as the language we use

to describe it, that there is always more to be said. This is undoubtedly true
of my account of the phenomenology of virtue. I have tried to provide a
model for the phenomenology of virtue that both captures its core features
and elucidates Aristotle’s own account. I have argued that we can understand
virtuous experience as the perceptually immediate recognition of affordances.
I have further argued that phronetic perception admits of those structural
features found in expert action more generally (autoteleology, nondeliberative
absorption, and self-recession). As I indicated at the outset, my aim has been
to capture something about the structure of virtuous experience and to do
so in a way that is true to the core features of virtue outlined by Aristotle. If
 The Self that Recedes 161

I have made my case persuasively, we have at least the outlines of a model of

virtue as a kind of perceptual expertise that is valuable for its own sake, largely
nondeliberative, and which has overcome the self-obsession characteristic of so
much nonphronetic action.

Notes

1 Admittedly, some argue that Aristotle thinks of phronesis only as figuratively

perceptual. For a defense of the claim that this is literal perception, as well as a
reply to those who argue otherwise, see Kontos (2011).
2 On a reading of the simile of the sun (made famous by Iris Murdoch), Plato
advocated the same basic ability. See Murdoch (2001).
References to Nicomachean Ethics in this chapter are to the text as it appears in:
Aristotle. 1980. Nicomachean Ethics, trans. David Ross. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
3 On one view, perceptions are always judgments, albeit nonconscious ones. I have
no desire, nor yet a need, to enter this debate in the current chapter. I would note,
however, that, if we can make sense of phrases like “nonconscious judgments,” the
phenomenology of such judgments will be importantly different from the ones with
which we are familiar. This in itself is a good reason not to assimilate the two things.
4 My account of emotions here, as I hope is obvious, is deeply Heideggerian.
Although I am using the term “emotion,” much of what I say stems directly from
Heidegger’s account of mood (Stimmung) in Being and Time. I do not intend to
conflate the two things, however. The term “mood” is much broader in Heidegger
than the term “emotion.” Restaurants and epochs can have their Stimmungen; it
would be awkward to say they have their “emotions.”
5 As will become apparent, my analysis is indebted to Annas’ (2008) excellent
discussion of flow experience and virtue.
6 See 1099a15–20: “Virtuous actions must be in themselves pleasant.”
7 Csikszentmihalyi distinguishes pleasure from enjoyment, noting that pleasure is
far less meaningful than enjoyment. His remarks fit Aristotle’s claims about the
sense in which virtuous action is pleasant and the kind of pleasure it occasions.
8 Admittedly, much of our action is composed of both autotelic and exotelic
moments. I do not mean to suggest otherwise.
9 For an excellent article on this point, see Dziob (1993).
10 See Zahavi (1999) and Gallagher (2005).
11 The resurgence of attention to the virtue tradition in recent years is in no small
part due to a dissatisfaction with just this kind of universalist model of moral
162 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

life—a model in which an abstract, disinterested rational agent is the only

agent in an appropriate epistemic position to make justifiable (and universal)
moral judgments. This kind of model is often attributed to both deontology
and utilitarianism in virtually all of their guises. Such a model also seems to fit
Habermas’s programmatic attempts at a discourse ethics. This model has been
criticized from a wide variety of positions, from communitarian to care ethicist,
for ignoring the situatedness of human action, pretending we somehow exist
apart from those fundamental relationships which dialogically constitute us.
See, for example, Sandel (1998), Gilligan (1993), MacIntyre (1984). Any theory
that ignores these relationships in favor of abstract ethical principles (such as
principles of justice, or of universalizability) ignores the texture of our lives in
favor of generalizable rules and hence misses crucial elements of the moral life.
12 See, for example, Gurwitsch 1966, especially 293–4.
13 Aristotle recognized this point as well: only certain kinds of knowledge admit of
logical proof. To insist that all knowledge must be acquired in this way is to confuse
truth with method and to impoverish the many ways we can know the world.
14 James sees this feature in Eastern traditions as well, but the material he had access
to was much more limited.
15 The literature on combat trauma is full of descriptions of soldiers who lose
any sense of themselves in the midst of combat. This loss of self is sometimes
accompanied by a brutality seldom found anywhere else. See Shay (1994).
 Part III

Application of Phenomenology
as a Virtue Discipline
164
 10

The Virtues of Agency: A Phenomenology

of Confidence, Courage, and Creativity
John Russon

Phenomenology is the description of experience in the terms in which it is

lived rather than in the terms we impose upon it because of our theories about
the nature of reality. Phenomenological description reveals the reality of our
experience not to be the neutral, alienated “object” and reveals us not to be the
detached, self-reflective “subjects” we typically presume in our theories about
experience. Instead, we live as inherently engaged subjects—we are “being-in-
the-world,” in Heidegger’s language—and the detached subject and object of our
theorizing are rather the features of a particular form of experience that develops
within and against the background of a more fundamental co-occurrence of
self and world (Heidegger 1962, 33, 78–86).1 The world of our everyday, lived
experience is an arena charged with meaning; we experience the object of our
experience primarily as a summons to action, a summons that affects us below
the level of our explicit, reflective subjectivity, drawing instead on an intimacy of
bond between self and world. We experience our world as calling us to action at
every level from the minimally practical, as when we experience the handrail as
calling from our grip, to the maximally ethical, as when we experience another
person in distress as commanding our compassion and support.2
Inasmuch as the world calls us to action, it also calls us to agency. The world,
that is, is not apprehended in its truth by a detached subject, but is appropriately
perceived, rather, only by an agent capable of responding to its summons, and at
a basic level, then, the world of our experience summons us to be agents. Now
we easily recognize that a child will have to undergo and actively participate in
a process of bodily development in order to acquire the skills necessary to carry
out the activities called for by living in the world. What a phenomenological
reflection on the experience of agency reveals beyond this, though, is that, to be
166 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

such appropriately responsive agents, we must also grow as subjects; this growth,
too, is one that we must actively participate in, as well as undergo. Agency, in
short, is not naturally occurring, but is achieved—as Aristotle says about the
polis, it is natural to us, but does not occur by nature—and ethical agency is
fundamentally a matter of undamaged development, itself predicated upon
proper care.3
In what follows, I will focus on three aspects of our experience that are
particularly important for understanding the kinds of habits we must develop
to have a healthy character, competent to engage effectively with the practical
and ethical issues that define our mature human lives: I will study, that is, the
“virtues”—the excellences or aretai, as Aristotle calls them—that are essential
to our being agents.4 I will focus first on the inherently interpersonal dimension
of experience, arguing that the habits of intersubjective recognition that are
developed in our childhood experience are what most basically determine
whether or not we can become stable, self-reliant agents capable of coping with
the demands of adult life. The child must be empowered to develop habits of
“ontological self-confidence”—recognizing herself to be a real and worthy being
in her own right—if she is to be capable in the future of developing a healthy
personal and interpersonal life. Second, I will focus on the risk that characterizes
our engagement with the world and argue that developing the virtue of “courage”
is one of the most basic aspects of healthy development. Beyond stability, initiative
is required if one is to be an effective agent, and I will argue that it is crucial to
the development of this aspect of agency that we develop habits of encountering
risk without being intimidated. Finally, I will focus on the need to cultivate habits
of creativity and plasticity in order to be able to respond appropriately to the
inherently open nature of the world of our interhuman experience. Our world
is not a deterministic nor even a fully determined one, but is instead an arena of
freedom—an arena that calls for our meaningful and formative participation in
it. For that reason, assuming our identity as free agents requires that we cultivate
our abilities to engage in creative practices. It is only for the person who cultivates
these virtues of confidence, courage, and creativity that ethical agency is possible;
equally, for the person who cultivates these virtues, ethical agency is natural.

Agency

Let us reflect on what it is to be an agent. An agent is one who acts, who does.
When another person uses force to grab my arm and lift it, the repositioning of
 The Virtues of Agency 167

my body is something done to me, not something done by me. The movement
of my arm is an act of mine when it is an expression of my will. In general, an
action is a change in the world that is itself an expression of “I,” and this is true
whether the material change is a transformation in one’s immediate, organic
body or a change, mediated by actions of that body, in the broader world beyond
the body.5 To be an agent is to be one who can “own” a change in the world, and
to experience oneself as an agent is to experience oneself as one who can express
her- or himself in and as such a change in the world. I want to reflect upon
what is involved in having such an experience of oneself, but I want to do so by
reflecting on how that experience comes to be. To that end, let us consider the
experience of a child.
Though, to an adult’s perspective, there is a clear difference between an
infant, her parents, and the room they are in, within that child’s perspective,
these distinctions are not straightforward. For the child, there is the event of
experience happening, and this event is underway before the child has learned
to navigate with the differentiation of self, others, and world. Her “growing
up” will be precisely her ever-improving navigation of these differences, a
growing up that will always happen within the space of that original event of
the (permanently) preconceptual, prelinguistic, prereflective happening of
experience.6 Rather than beginning, armed, so to speak, with the concepts “self,”
“other,” and “world,” the child’s early experience will be the process of learning
of this distinction, learning its importance, and learning to live meaningfully in
relation to it.7
As the child gradually learns to control “her own” body (i.e., as she gradually
appropriates it, gradually makes it her own by finding herself in it), and as she
gradually learns to interact effectively with the things around her (i.e., as she
gradually comes to experience things as things, isolating one from another and
from the larger “setting,” relying upon the consistency of the self-identity over
time of each and the predictably of its placement in the spatial world, and so on),
she is simultaneously establishing her life with others, which, as Eva Simms has
shown, most prominently means (in typical cases) establishing a life with her
mother.8 The child pushes the toy truck over the floor, for example, but as she does
so she looks up, expectant, into her mother’s face: for the child, the practice of
using her body and moving the toy is intertwined with the search for the mother’s
approbation. Though from our outside perspective, mother and toy are radically
different realities, within the perspective of the child, they are not thus differentiated:
a phenomenological description of the child’s experience as it is lived must
acknowledge that dealing with the toy is an aspect of dealing with “Mama.”9
168 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

Inasmuch as agency involves the experience of oneself as capable of effecting

change in the material world, agency presupposes an experience of the
differentiation of self from others and of self from world. The experience of
agency, then, will be a development—and a transformation—within this original
childhood experience of self-other-world intertwinement. In this original
setting, in other words, the child is not an agent.10 The early development of the
child is the gradual process of transformation from experience as something
simply undergone—the “happening” of a texture of emergent feelings, motions,
sounds, etc.—to experience as something substantially shaped by doing. This
shift to “doing,” a shift that itself hovers between something undergone by and
something done by the child, is the performative emergence of the child’s agency,
an emergence that is a transformative of and within the original setting of
intertwinement. Let us now consider what is involved in this “becoming agent.”

The virtues of agency I: Primary self-confidence

Heidegger describes us as “preontological” (Heidegger 1962, 12). He means

by this that we are the kind of being that is intrinsically oriented toward the
question of being as such—we are always implicitly concerned about the nature
of being. Even more, our own being is an issue for us: we are always implicitly
asking (of ourselves, of our others, of our world), “What am I?” R. D. Laing,
drawing upon this phenomenological insight, has shown that this issue is not
just a theoretical matter, but a matter of the deepest existential concern to us,
and, he has shown, how we are able to answer this question of our existence is
formative of our characters at the most basic levels. Specifically, Laing argues
that we are all animated by a fundamental uncertainty about our own reality,
and healthy human life is a matter of accomplishing a sense of confidence in one’s
own reality. Laing refers to this most basic confidence as “ontological security.”11
Establishing this sense of confidence in one’s reality is crucially dependent upon
one’s interactions with others. With this theme in mind, let us consider again the
child’s experience.12
The sense of self with which one operates is an interpretation of one’s
experience. Our sense of self (what Hegel, in his Phenomenology of Spirit, helpfully
calls our “self-certainty,” to emphasize that this sense of self is an hypothesis of
which we are merely subjectively certain, rather than an unambiguous factual
truth that we observe) is our “take” on who we are, as that can be made to fit in
 The Virtues of Agency 169

the broader domain of the experiential fabric of self-others-world.13 Our sense

of self, in other words, is not so much an introspective observation as it is a
claim about how to make sense of the world: it is a claim about how the various
“poles” of this total experiential fabric should be understood with respect to
each other, and it is thus a claim that is subject to validation and endorsement
by those other poles. Our sense of self, in other words, is who we can successfully
maintain ourselves to be in our larger interaction with the world. This is an
ongoing issue throughout our lives—as, for example, when an adult’s claim to
being a good friend or a poor singer is rejected by that person’s personal or
musical associates—but it is especially an issue for the developing child.14 Let us
consider this issue in the context of the experience of the toy truck.15
Navigating one’s experience of the toy truck as a worldly thing amounts to
learning how hard to grip it, what will make it move, what engagements with
it cause pain, and so on. Navigating one’s experience of the toy truck as a
medium for engaging with mother, however, involves an engagement with very
different issues; certain practices elicit smiles, petting and friendly comments
from mother, whereas certain other practices elicit resistance and unhappiness
from mother. Integral, then, to the engagement with the toy truck, as that reality
exists within the perspective of the child, is the engagement with the realities
of interpersonal approval: for the child, the truck-reality is “made out of ” the
mother’s attitude as much as it is made out of plastic (Winnicott 2005, 18–20).
Further, this worldly motherly thing is also not something to which the child
herself is indifferent; on the contrary, the variations in the status of the mother-
world reality directly influence the child’s self-experience. The motherly
disapproval of pushing the truck into the cat, for example, directly produces a
feeling of unhappy unworthiness in the child.16 The changes in the truck reality,
then, are simultaneously and inseparably changes in self-experience as much as
they are changes in mother and world: the truck-reality is inseparably “made
out of ” plastic, mother’s mood and child’s sense of self-worth.17
The child engages with an interpersonal reality through the truck, and
navigating with the distinctly interpersonal issues is different in kind from
navigating with the “thingly” issues. Whereas the “thingly” characteristics of
the toy are fixed and can be mastered in determinable ways (and identifying
these terms and strategies is what is ultimately studied and documented in
the natural sciences), the interpersonal aspects of the things are themselves
determined by the will of the other and, as such, cannot be fixed and mastered
from outside. In short, navigating the interpersonal domain of experience can
170 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

only be done in cooperation with the other person. What counts as success, then,
in the child’s navigation of the inherently interpersonal fabric of its experience
of self-others-world, is substantially defined by the attitude—the will—of the
significant other(s). It is this experience of interpersonal success or lack thereof
that is the material out of which the child’s sense of self is formed.
Now, for the child to become an agent, the child needs to develop a sense of
itself as a “force” in reality, as one whose sense of importance carries weight in
shaping how things are, as a will that makes a difference. The world in which
it seeks to have an impact and to be recognized is the world in which thing
and mother (or, more broadly, others) are intertwined. It is this world that must
confirm the weight of the child’s will, allowing the child to develop a basic sense
of confidence in its own worth, in its own reality as an agent. But, inasmuch as
that world has the (m)other’s will as its fabric, it is thus up to the (m)other to
allow the child to develop this confidence.18 When it cries or otherwise expresses
distress, does anyone notice? When it says “I want x,” does that carry weight
with the (m)other? When the child says “no,” does that carry weight with the
(m)other? It is through the behaviors that engage with these questions that the
child will form its sense of its weight in the world, its reality: these are what will
allow it to develop (or not) the confidence in itself that is essential to agency.
The child cannot on its own confirm its own worth, its own agency. Doing so
is a cooperative venture between (m)other and child, but it is a cooperative
venture in which the (m)other holds virtually “all the cards,” so to speak, for the
(m)other is precisely the one with an autonomous will and a developed sense
of agency, whereas the child inhabits this terrain fundamentally in the mode of
vulnerability and thus does not have an equal “hand” to play. The (m)other will
have to convey to the child the appropriate reinforcement to its hypothesis about
itself that it is someone. Most fundamentally, then, to become an agent—to
become a “self ”—the child needs to develop a confident sense of its own reality,
which means it must be able to rest, trustingly, in the support of its (m)other.
Allowing this rest is perhaps the primary responsibility of the parent (and not
one that is automatically fulfilled).
We saw above that the “other” character of the intertwined fabric of the
child’s world brings with it distinct characteristics because the domain of the
other is the domain of the will. Now we see further what is distinctive about
the “self-experience” side of this intertwined reality of self-world-others, namely,
that this dimension (also a domain of will, but will in the mode of vulnerability
rather than in the mode of autonomy), (a) is a kind of question and (b) is shaped
and changed through the process.19 It is not a fixed pole, in other words, but a
 The Virtues of Agency 171

dynamic and malleable point of reference. At a most basic level, our existence
as agents is not simply a natural condition, but is a matter of character, of habit,
and this first of all in the sense that one must become habituated to a sense
of self-confidence. Confidence, then, before being a self-conscious view of a
subject about itself is the very fabric of a self; I will refer to it as the virtue of
primary confidence to distinguish this implicit and formative confidence from
the explicit and self-reflective self-interpretation agents go on to develop. The
accomplishment of this habit of primary self-confidence is, furthermore, from
the start, an interpersonal accomplishment. Let us now consider two other such
“primary” virtues: primary courage and primary creativity.

The virtues of agency II: Primary courage

We have just seen that, before it is an explicitly self-conscious stance an agent

adopts, confidence is more fundamentally a matter of being an agent: the virtue
of “primary self-confidence” is a character one must develop, and it is developed
cooperatively with others. Something similar is true of courage. We typically
think of courage as an attitude adopted by an agent, showing her or his moral
strength. In fact, courage, more fundamentally, is essential to the very fabric
of being an agent, so, again, we distinguish the familiar but derivative form of
courage from a primary, formative courage.
Courage is essentially a further development of the experience of confidence;
it is the sense that I can cope with challenges, that is, it essentially determines
the intent and extent of my confidence. Now primary confidence, we saw, is
the basic sense that I am real and that I matter: primary confidence is the basic
ability to be someone, to be oneself, an ability that is largely given to us by
another. Courage is the further ability to take that self into the realm of another
that does not give confidence. It is essentially the ability to rely upon one’s
already established self-confidence to support oneself as one holds onto a plan
or a value in a challenging situation, that is, precisely a situation that does not
already offer one confirmation. By having become habituated to being able to
experience the other as a site of confirmation, I develop a firm sense of self that
then allows me to deal with situations in which that confirmation is lacking.
Beyond minimal agency, courage is the strength of agency.
We can again focus on describing from the inside the experience of the
growing child. Many situations that, for an adult, seem merely mechanical
matters of dealing with a neutral situation can be, for a child, charged sites
172 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

of danger or adventure. For the very young child, letting go its familiar
supports, striving for an upright posture, and propelling itself forward as it
ventures into the open space of walking is at first a novel and challenging
reconfiguration of its inhabitation of its body and its surroundings, both
material and interpersonal.20 As adults, we have typically mastered the everyday
maneuvering of physical space, with the result that we do not recognize the
emotionally and interpersonally challenging character of spatial inhabitation
(though such experiences as agoraphobia and claustrophobia should remind
us that that such mastery is not automatic).21 For the child learning to walk,
however, this practice carries the ambiguous promise of a new life, as she
elevates her status in relation to her relevant others and, indeed, rises—or
fails to rise—to their hopes and expectations. To embrace the challenge of
walking is not simply to rise to an upright posture; it is also to rise to the
interpersonal challenge and to embrace the risk of failure at measuring up.
Learning to walk is not simply a matter of learning to manipulate one’s body;
it is also a matter of accepting to throw oneself into a threatening situation and
to put trust in oneself to master the challenge with which one is confronted.
Through its engagement with this process, the child is becoming habituated
not simply to walking, but to how it will handle challenges—whether with
rashness, timidity, or courage.22 Other, similar situations throughout the
process of growing up—staying in a room alone, meeting strangers—can
again seem to an adult to be merely “practical” matters of dealing with the
prosaic demands of a neutral world, but for the growing child, these situations
demand courage in order to be navigated well. The abilities developed
through these situations—being able to deal effectively with space, being able
to deal effectively with others—are precisely what constitute free agency. An
attitude of proto-courage, then, is demanded of us simply to become agents.
Consequently, the way the growing child handles such situations is formative
for her developing character: how she will become an agent will be how she
becomes habituated to a lived sense of herself as someone who engages with
challenging situations, how she develops a lived sense of demanding situations
as “too much to deal with” or as “always to be tackled” or as “to be handled
calmly.” Courage, then, before it is an attitude adopted by an agent is integral
to the very formation of our agency, and we must thus recognize, along with
the virtue of primary confidence, the virtue of primary courage.
Again, as with primary confidence, so with primary courage, our ability
to develop this virtue depends substantially on the support of others.
The growing child encounters these formative situations in a situation of
 The Virtues of Agency 173

substantial vulnerability, and it is incumbent upon the child’s caregivers to

care for how such situations are encountered and navigated. It is precisely the
child’s agency—which is to say, indeed, the child’s experience and enactment
of its freedom—that is vulnerable, and in order to become a healthy agent,
which is to say in order to be appropriately courageous, the child needs to
be neither forced prematurely into overly challenging situations nor held
back from becoming practiced at handling challenges.23 The child needs to
become practiced at recognizing that it does have the competence to cope
with challenging situations and that, through commitment and effort, it can
transform an oppositional situation into a manageable one, and for this to
happen, the child needs to be given the opportunity to work on situations in
which it can be successful.24 As Simone de Beauvoir writes in The Ethics of
Ambiguity, “there is an apprenticeship of freedom,” that is, we have to learn
how to be free, and the child depends fundamentally on how its caregivers
provide for this education (Beauvoir 1976, 37).25

The virtues of agency III: Primary creativity

In our everyday adult affairs, we take it for granted that a normal individual can
prepare a meal, make a plan for the evening, or organize an event. Each of these
activities, though, requires the ability to invent: the ability to bring into being
a reality that would never appear on its own in the world, but that comes into
being only through the spontaneous creativity and individuality of the agent.
Such ability to “come up with something,” to establish terms for a situation
beyond anything that one’s environment offers up on its own, is essential to
our normal sense of adult agency, and, again, such effective creativity is not a
natural occurrence but is a virtue that one has accomplished through cultivation
and habituation. Prior to the self-conscious practices of creative thinking and
acting, there is, again, a virtue of primary creativity that is integral to one’s
formation as an agent.
Courage is a transformative cultivation of the basic hold on experience
(the self-world-others matrix) that is established in primary confidence, and
creativity is a further stage of this same trajectory. Courage is called for by a
situation that confronts one with challenges that must be mastered; creativity,
beyond this, is a response to a situation that does not itself make a precise
demand. It is an engagement with possibility in which one acknowledges one’s
own agency as formative for the situation. Whereas primary confidence is a
174 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

lived recognition of oneself as real and primary courage is a lived recognition

of oneself as capable, primary creativity is a lived recognition of oneself as a
generative source. Each is an essential dimension of our agency, our enactment
of our freedom, and it is in creativity that we most own up to our freedom
as such.
At each level, being an agent—being a “self ”—is an accomplishment: it is
a matter of being able to retain a self-centeredness in the face of a propulsion
to dissolution that one must withstand. At first, the very fact of the already-
establishedness of the world challenges one with the sense that one is nothing,
and, unless that world offers one the gift of confirmation, one cannot maintain
the hypothesis—the “certainty,” in Hegel’s language—of self. Even with this
minimal sense of self accomplished, the world confronts one with demands to
which one might be unable to measure up, and one can find, again, that one
can maintain oneself only in retreat from the specific challenges of the world
(in timidity) or denial of the reality of the specific challenges of the world (in
rashness). Even if one can successfully wrestle with and master the world’s
demands, the world confronts one with a reality that does not itself offer
sufficient terms for its appraisal—for its identification and for the determination
of what is required of one to deal with it—and such indeterminacy can again
be an overwhelming challenge to one’s sense of self. To be an agent capable
of navigating this world effectively requires one be sufficiently plastic in one’s
responsiveness to cope with undefined situations, and it is the cultivation
of such plasticity of agency, such openness, that is the virtue of primary
creativity.
To develop a living grasp of this side of its own agency, the growing child
must become habituated to the experience of turning to itself for the resources
to make something of its situation; the child needs to become practiced at
operating with a domain beyond the actual, which is to say that the child must
cultivate its experience of imagination. We saw above that the child first needs
a situation of reliable confirmation that allows it to rest with a stable sense of
itself, and that a child needs subsequently a history of grappling successfully
with appropriately challenging situations that require it to work, and that allow
it to develop the courage and competence necessary to answer to the demands
of actuality. We can now see, finally, why it is crucial that the child cultivate
with the world a relationship of play, to allow it to develop the ability to turn to
itself to grapple with a situation that does not on its own provide the terms for
its own interpretation.26 Through play, the child engages with the world as a site
in need of the child’s spontaneous generation of meaning, thereby becoming
 The Virtues of Agency 175

practiced in inhabiting the domain of possibility and creativity. The virtue of

primary creativity is the formation of a character that livingly recognizes itself
as a spontaneous source of meaning, a being that inhabits a reality beyond the
actual even as it is essentially engaged with the actual.27

Conclusion: Ethical agency

Agency is not a given characteristic of the human being. It is, rather, a

cooperatively cultivated stance: a virtue. The full demands of the cultivation
of agency is the proper subject of much larger study than this, but here we
have seen in outline the essential parameters of this cultivation of agency
in confidence, courage, and creativity. To fully assume our agency—our
freedom—is to cultivate these different virtues, and a deficiency in any one of
these amounts to a deficiency in our very being as agents. We can broadly and
roughly articulate these deficient species of agency.28 A well-developed sense
of confidence and creativity coupled with an underdeveloped habituation to
the world of challenge and work leaves one a mere dreamer or adventurer
without a realistic sense of the responsibilities of acting in the world. A well-
developed ability to work without a developed sense of creativity, on the other
hand, leaves one in a stance of passivity, a follower whose greatest virtue is
the ability to conform and produce.29 Most serious of all, an underdeveloped
ability to trust in one’s secure place in the world leaves one always struggling
at a point “before” engagement with the actual, so to speak: one is not yet fully
acting in the world, for one is always engaged, rather, with the prior issue of
struggling against the world to establish a secure sense of self-possession. In
short, healthy agency requires that we have found ourselves before the actual,
in the actual, and beyond the actual, an intersubjective accomplishment that
itself depends on an appropriately nurturing environment that provides the
growing child with a stable trusting environment in which it can rest, secure in
its sense of self, the appropriate encouragement to explore, risk, and work, and
encouragement to play.
The virtuous agent is, ultimately, the person able to recognize reality as such,
to cope with the real needs of the situation. Unlike the person struggling with
underdeveloped primary confidence, this is the agent from whom the situation
is not fundamentally “about” herself: it is the agent, that is, who can turn to the
situation itself to see what it calls for. Unlike the person who was insufficiently
initiated into the virtue of primary courage, this is the agent who lives with a
176 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

sense that the situation makes demands and is not simply a site for self-defined
adventure. And finally, unlike the person with an insufficiently cultivated sense
of primary creativity, this is also the agent for whom the situation is not “black
and white,” not an agent, that is, who presumes the established order has already
defined all the rules and that one need only follow them to be free.30 This is an
agent, that is, who experiences the world as calling on her creativity to realize
“what is called for,” where the world itself does not provide an easy answer
to what that is.31 This agent is an agent of conscience, who realizes that she is
responsible to the world, that her creativity is required in determining what that
responsibility involves, and who has the strength of will to stand behind that
recognition. In short, it is the virtues of agency that allow us to receive the call
of the good.

Notes

1 The Buddhist tradition has often been phenomenologically oriented, and one
might profitably compare here the notion of “pratítya-samutpáda,” “dependent
co-arising.”
2 See Merleau-Ponty 2012, 69–70. That we experience the object bodily as a
“solicitation” is a central theme running through Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2012).
3 Aristotle, Politics, Book I, Chapter 1. Compare his remarks about the development
of a morally virtuous character in Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, Chapter 1.
4 I have also discussed this theme in Russon (2006).
5 One of the fullest discussions of the various dimensions integral to the experience
of agency is F. W. J. Schelling 1993, 155–93.
6 The event (Ereignis) of being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein) is a central theme of
Heidegger’s philosophical investigations. The form of this happening of experience
is the central concern of Division One of Being and Time; see also Immanuel Kant
2003, 344–52.
7 One of the central thrusts of the phenomenological tradition is to argue, against
both a traditional empiricism that imagines all knowledge to be a posteriori and
a traditional rationalism that imagines knowledge to be a priori, that we learn
through experience along those avenues to which we have an a priori openness.
These themes are central to Merleau-Ponty’s analysis in the Phenomenology of
Perception; see especially the discussion of the correlation of our lived sense of our
bodily selves and our sense of space in “The Spatiality of One’s Own Body” and his
discussion of the “pairing” of perspectives in childhood experiences of imitation
in “Other Selves and the Human World.” On the intersubjective background to
 The Virtues of Agency 177

the formation of an explicit differentiation of self and others, see also Merleau-
Ponty: “Up to the age of three months, according to Wallon, there is no external
perception of others by the child, and what ought to be concluded when, for
example, the child is seen to cry because someone goes away is that he has an
‘impression of incompleteness.’ Rather than truly perceiving those who are there,
he feels incomplete when someone goes away” (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 124). Piaget
and Inhelder similarly connect developments in children’s spatial perspective
directly with their operational motor activities, though their analysis differs in
important ways from Merleau-Ponty’s (Piaget and Inhelder 1956, 209). See also
Roseanne Kermoian and Joseph J. Campos (1988). For more on the theme of the
“pairing” of the perspective of infant and others from within which the child’s
self-concept emerges, see Andrew N. Meltzoff (2005) and Andrew N. Meltzoff
and M. K. Moore (1997). For challenges to some aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s
interpretation of the child’s experience in terms of a nondistinction of self and
others, see Shaun Gallagher and Andrew Meltzoff (1996); the analysis in this chapter
seems to me to reflect a fundamental misunderstanding and misrepresentation
of Merleau-Ponty’s position, which welcomes early experiences of imitation
but challenges the individualist interpretation of such experiences presumed by
Gallagher and Meltzoff. On this theme, see Kym Maclaren: “while the idea that
the very young infant has a perceptual sense of herself as distinct from otherness
moves away from the modern, Cartesian, mentalistic conception of subjectivity
and towards an embodied understanding of subjectivity, it nonetheless holds
uncritically, I fear, to a Cartesian assumption that this subjectivity is from the
beginning self-sufficient, self-possessed, and self-governing” (Maclaren 2008, 88).
See also Whitney Howell 2012, Chapter 3.
8 Eva-Maria Simms (2001). See also D. W. Winnicott 2005, 15–20.
9 On the use of phenomenological method in relationship to the experience of
infants, see Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (1999).
10 Compare D. W. Winnicott: “It is at the beginning, when the baby is living in
a subjective world, that health cannot be described in terms of the individual
alone. Later it becomes possible for us to think of a healthy child in an unhealthy
environment, but these words make no sense at the beginning, till the baby has
become able to make an objective assessment of actuality, and has become able to
be clear about the not-me as distinct from the me, and between the shared actual
and the phenomena of personal psychical reality, and has something of an internal
environment” (Winnicott 1990, 23); and “Much of the physical part of infant
care—holding, handling, bathing, feeding, and so on—is designed to facilitate the
baby’s achievement of a psyche-soma that lives and works in harmony with itself ”
(29). See also J. H. van den Berg (1961).
11 See R. D. Laing (2010).
178 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

12 I have studied this theme more substantially in Russon 2003, especially

Chapters 4 and 5.
13 See G. W. F. Hegel 1977, Chapter IV, “The Truth of Self-Certainty.” For my own
analysis and interpretation of Hegel’s text, see John Russon 2004, Chapters 5, 6,
and 11.
14 Derek Lundy gives a fictional, but compelling, description of an adult experience
that demonstrates well the relevance of these issues to adult life; the scenario
described here of the sailor climbing the mast under the eyes of the first mate
shows well that the sort of “triangulation” of self, world, and others that we will see
to be formative for childhood experience is also formative in adult situations of
vulnerability (Lundy 2002, 19–26).
15 See Kirsten Jacobson (2011).
16 See Melanie Klein for the idea that it is not so much the child’s needs as the
mother’s responsiveness to them that is formative of the child’s affective
experience (Klein 1975, especially 220–1). Cf. Kym Maclaren 2008, 71. Cf, also,
René A. Spitz (1951), who argues that, though children in foundling homes had
their basic organic needs met, they faced developmental problems due to lack of
intimate physical contact.
17 Edith Cobb emphasizes the importance of the “dialectic” between self and world
throughout; see Cobb 1977, 22, 28–31, 70–3, 107–11.
18 This idea that confirmation is the primary issue in interpersonal exchanges is at
the heart of Hegel’s (1977) “dialectic of recognition” (paragraphs 178–96 in Miller’s
translation). See also Merleau-Ponty 2012, 191.
19 This idea that the inner life of the child is shaped through the experience of the
mother runs throughout Melanie Klein (1975). See especially, “Love, Guilt and
Reparation,” “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States,”
and “Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States.”
20 See Winnicott: “when children venture away from home it is crucial for them
to have parents who will welcome them home from these movements away, and
without this security offered by the parents, children can experience problems in
the development of their agency; the process of discovery requires that we can
bring it back to a place of confirmation and familiarity” (Winnicott 1990, 133–41).
21 On agoraphobia and claustrophobia, see Kirsten Jacobson (2004) and “Spatiality
and Agency: A Phenomenology of Containment,” (unpublished).
22 As Aristotle emphasizes in the Nicomachean Ethics (Book II, Chapters 6–7, and
Book III, Chapters 6–9), courage, and every other virtue, is a “mean”; he defines
courage in particular as the mean for dealing with situations of fear, and the one-
sided extreme positions with which it is contrasted are rashness and cowardice.
23 See Winnicott (1992); see also his discussion of lack of support when returning
from “danger” (Winnicott 1990, 133–41).
 The Virtues of Agency 179

24 Hegel discusses the importance of work for self-formation in his discussion of the
experience of the slave; see Hegel 1977, paragraphs 194–6. I have analyzed this in
Russon 2004, Chapter 6.
25 On this theme, see Susan Bredlau (2011).
26 Edith Cobb discusses the value of play and plasticity (in childhood and adulthood)
(Cobb 1977, 33–6 and 87–95). See also Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (2003).
27 See Winnicott: “it is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or
adult is able to be creative and use the whole personality, and it is only in being
creative that the individual discovers the self ” (Winnicott 2005, 72–3).
28 Compare Beauvoir’s discussion of the deficient forms of inhabiting ones freedom
in Chapter 2 of The Ethics of Ambiguity.
29 See Winnicott: “It is creative apperception more than anything else that makes
the individual feel that life is worth living. Contrasted with this is a relationship
to external reality which is one of compliance, the world and its details being
recognized but only as something to be fitted in with or demanding adaptation.
Compliance carries with it a sense of futility for the individual and is associated
with the idea that nothing matters and that life is not worth living” (Winnicott
2005, 87).
30 Compare Merleau-Ponty 1964, 100–8.
31 Compare Søren Kierkegaard’s discussion of “the despair of possibility that lacks
necessity” and “the despair of necessity that lacks possibility” (Kierkegaard 1980,
36–7).
 11

Heideggerian Perfectionism and

the Phenomenology of the Pedagogical
Truth Event
Iain Thomson

“Paideia does not consist in merely pouring knowledge into the unprepared
soul as if it were some container held out empty and waiting. On the contrary,
real education lays hold of the soul itself and transforms it in its entirety by
first of all leading us to the place of our essential being and accustoming us
to it.”
Martin Heidegger, “Plato’s Teaching on Truth”1

As I have shown elsewhere, Heidegger’s philosophy of education is a philosophy

of transformation, one profoundly concerned with both personal and historical
transformation.2 Here I would like to say more about the crucial moment
in which these two dimensions intersect, such that personal and historical
transformation come together to illuminate, motivate, and facilitate one another.
I call this doubly transformative moment the pedagogical truth event. In such
events, we achieve a revolutionary return to the self that shows us how to step
beyond our nihilistic late-modernity into a genuinely meaningful postmodern
understanding of being. To begin to explain this doubly transformative event,
I shall briefly unpack its personal and historical dimensions and then address
their intersection.
On the level of personal transformation, Heidegger’s ontological understanding
of education is centrally concerned with that paradoxical question at the heart
of the “perfectionist” tradition (from and alongside which Western virtue theory
developed): How do we become what we are? “Becoming what we are” means
discovering the ground on which we already stand, without having realized it.
 Heideggerian Perfectionism 181

What we are, ontologically, is a world-disclosing being (a Dasein or “being-

here”), that is, a being who implicitly participates in the making-intelligible of its
world (by “unconcealing the concealed,” or “worlding the earth,” in Heidegger’s
language). To realize such world-disclosure means both (1) to recognize the
implicit role we already play in constituting our intelligible worlds and also (2)
to cultivate and develop these implicit skills for “poietic” world-disclosure, that
is, for discerning and creatively developing the possibilities that continually
emerge at the dynamic intersection between self and world, human being and
being itself. In Heidegger’s early work, to realize what we already are is to be
transformed by coming full circle back to ourselves, an existential odyssey of
departure and return I have called the revolutionary return to ourselves. In his
later work the emphasis shifts, and Heidegger suggests a more complex account
of how this transformative return to the self takes place. It is this later vision
that I shall reconstruct here, since it is more carefully attuned to the historical
dimension of historical intelligibility.3
For Heidegger, that we each play a role in constituting our intelligible worlds
never meant that we can freely determine how things show up for us, making
cruelty look kind, ugliness beautiful, or frenzy relaxing by force of will or rational
argument (pace widespread caricatures of “existential voluntarism”). He begins
by acknowledging discursivity, the fact that the subconscious processes through
which we render reality intelligible to ourselves dictates that even our sensory
uptake of that reality is selective (as we can see by comparing our sense of smell
with a dog’s, or our comparatively impoverished visual acuity with a hawk’s)
and that the subconscious processes of attention to and conceptualization of
this selectively gathered perceptual information work to filter and organize it
yet further (as we can see by comparing our sensitivity to shades of color with
those of a skilled artist, or our taste of wine with that of an expert oenophile,
or even our experience of the same film while viewing it in different moods or
life-stages). As this suggests, our intelligible world, even in its greatest richness,
is ordinarily a slice of a slice of reality at best.4 Yes, this helps explain why the
text does not mean the same thing for the expert teacher as it does for the novice
student, but that is only an important instance of the more general truth that
the way the world shows up for one expert teacher is not simply the way it shows
up for another, let alone the way it has always shown up or will always show up
for all human or other world-disclosing beings.
When Heidegger contrasts the different historical worlds of the ancient
Greeks, medieval Christians, and modern Westerners, his primary concern
182 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

is not with gender, class, or cultural differences but, instead, with a pervasive
phenomenological difference in the way the world shows up that is even more
fundamental (since all meaningful gender, class, and culture differences are, but
not all being is shaped by gender, class, or cultural difference). Heidegger’s focus
is on the way Western humanity’s understanding of being—our most basic sense
of what it means to be—gets constituted, focused, transmitted, and transformed.
In his view, this “history of being” changes drastically over time and yet is neither
a constantly shifting medium we can alter at will nor an unchanging monolith
over which human beings have no influence. Heidegger’s understanding of
ontological historicity—of the way in which our basic sense of reality changes
with time—occupies a middle ground between the poles of voluntaristic
constructivism and quietistic fatalism. Historical intelligibility is neither a
formless Heraclitean flux (pace Derrida) nor an unbroken Parmenidean unity
(pace Rorty). Instead, according to Heidegger’s punctuated equilibrium view of
historicity (a view I call ontological epochality), our changing understanding of
being takes shape as a series of three drastically different but internally unified
and relatively coherent historical “epochs,” the ancient, medieval, and modern.
(The ancient and modern epochs further divide into the Presocratic and the
Platonic as well as the modern and late modern ages, for a total of five ages in
the Western “history of being,” five overlapping yet distinguishable historical
constellations of intelligibility.)5 In each of these “epochs,” the overwhelming
floodwaters of being are temporarily dammed so that an island of historical
intelligibility can arise out of the river of time. Ontotheologies are what build,
undermine, and rebuild these dams. How, then, do ontotheologies accomplish
this important role?
Put simply, ontotheologies focus and disseminate our basic sense of what it
means to be. Our fundamental understanding of the being of entities—that is,
of what and how all entities are—gets shaped historically by the ontotheological
tradition running from Plato to Nietzsche. Grasping the entire intelligible
order by uncovering both its innermost “ontological” core and its outermost
“theological” expression, ontotheologies link these antipodal perspectives
together so as to ground an historical age’s sense of reality from the inside-out
and the outside-in simultaneously. Ontotheologies doubly anchor an epoch’s
historical understanding of being when they succeed in grasping reality from
both extremes at once, temporarily establishing both its microscopic depths
and ultimate telescopic expression. Thus, to take only the most important
example, the sense of reality unifying our own late-modern age is rooted in
the ontotheology first articulated by Nietzsche. Universalizing insights already
 Heideggerian Perfectionism 183

discovered by Adam Smith and Charles Darwin in the domains of economics

and biology, Nietzsche recognized that for us reality is ultimately nothing but
competing forces coming-together and breaking-apart with no end beyond the
maximal growth that perpetuates these underlying forces themselves. This is
precisely what Heidegger discerns as Nietzsche’s “unthought” ontotheology, his
understanding of the being of entities as “eternally recurring will-to-power.”
As long as we cannot think beneath or beyond such ontotheologies, they come
to function like self-fulfilling prophecies, thanks to what I have called ontological
holism. Everything intelligible is in some way, so when ontotheologies reshape
our sense of “is-ness” itself, they thereby catalyze a transformation in our sense
of what it means for anything to be, including ourselves. These ontotheologies
implicitly reshape our sense of what and how all things are, functioning like lenses
we do not usually see but, instead, see through. The problem is that Nietzsche’s
ontotheology of eternally recurring will-to-power inaugurates what Heidegger
famously calls the “technological” understanding of being, or “enframing”
(Gestell). As we late-moderns come to understand the being of all entities as
nothing but forces seeking their own self-perpetuating growth, we increasingly
tend to treat all things—even ourselves and each other—as intrinsically
meaningless “resources” (Bestand) standing by merely to be optimized, enhanced,
and ordered for maximally flexible use.
As I argued in Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of
Education, the ongoing reduction of education to the empty optimization
imperative—“Get the most for the least!”—has to be understood not simply as a
result of capitalist corporatization or bureaucratic routinization but, even more
deeply, in terms of the nihilistic technological ontotheology underlying all of
these phenomena. When all entities are implicitly understood and so treated
as nothing but intrinsically meaningless resources to be optimized, it is not
surprising that education becomes increasingly corporatized, instrumentalized,
and technologized. Nor is it surprising that students come to see education
merely as a way to “Get the most out of their potentials” (where that typically
means maximizing their financial prospects). Nor that indolence and dishonesty
become rampant (since the optimization imperative makes cutting-corners and
even cheating seem rational if students can get away with it; for, they mistakenly
conclude, what better way to optimize—to get more for less—than to “earn” a
diploma while doing as little work as possible?). When seen in the light of our
technological ontotheology, it is also not surprising that plagiarism becomes
a growing problem (along with a whole burgeoning culture of theft). For, that
techno-utopian mantra, “information wants to be free,” while literally false
184 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

(since information does not actually desire anything) is nevertheless not a bad
diagnosis of the basic problem with our technological understanding of being,
which increasingly reduces reality to nothing but “information” (dichotomous
binaries) seeking ever more efficient means of circulation (and so naturally shorn
of such purportedly obsolete rituals as authorship). Nor is it surprising, finally,
that the administrative bureaucracy becomes a self-regulating system pursuing
its own self-optimizing growth in the name of increasing “efficiency,” that is, of
regulating and maximizing the input/output ratios of the university as a system
(often under the alibi of the pursuit of an excoriated “excellence”).
These serious problems afflicting education are deeply entrenched in the
metaphysical substructure of our historical self-understanding and so need to
be diagnosed and treated at that level. This means we need to become aware
of the subtle and often unnoticed impact of our late-modern, technological
ontotheology so that we can learn to resist and transcend it. The larger question,
then, is how we might transcend our late-modern, technological ontotheology
and so inaugurate a postmodern understanding of being, and how Heidegger’s
perfectionist understanding of education can help us make that historical
transition. The educational key to making this transformative transition from
our nihilistic late-modern understanding of being to a genuinely meaningful
postmodernity, Heidegger suggests, is to learn to practice the phenomenological
comportment he calls “dwelling” (or “releasement to things”). To put it much
too briefly, to learn to dwell is to become attuned to the phenomenological
“presencing” (Anwesen) whereby “being as such” manifests itself. “Being as
such” is one of the later Heidegger’s names for that conceptually inexhaustible
dimension of intelligibility which all metaphysics’ different ontotheological
ways of understanding the being of entities partly capture but never exhaust,
the recognition of which can help lead us beyond our current ontotheology. For,
if we can learn from the great poets and artists to become comportmentally
attuned to the dynamic phenomenological presencing that both precedes
and exceeds all conceptualization, then we too can come to understand and
experience entities as being richer in meaning than we are capable of doing
justice to conceptually, rather than taking them as intrinsically meaningless
resources awaiting optimization. Such experiences can become microcosms of,
as well as inspiration for, the revolution beyond our underlying ontotheology
that we need in order to transcend the nihilism of late-modern enframing and
set our world on a different, more meaningful path.
In order to understand the drastically different ways of comporting ourselves
toward things that Heidegger contrasts phenomenologically—namely, the active
 Heideggerian Perfectionism 185

receptivity of poetic dwelling, on the one hand, and the obtuse domination of
technological enframing, on the other—it helps to think about the difference
between these poetic and technological modes of revealing in terms of the
ancient Greek distinction between poiesis and technê. Just think, on the one hand,
of a poetic shepherding into being which respects the natural potentialities of
the matters with which it works, just as Michelangelo (who, let us recall, worked
in a marble quarry) legendarily claimed he simply set his “David” free from a
particularly rich piece of marble (after studying it carefully for a month). Or, for
a less hyperbolic example, think of the way a skillful woodworker notices the
inherent qualities of particular pieces of wood—attending to subtleties of shape
and grain, different shades of color, weight, and hardness—while deciding what
might be built from that wood (or whether to build from it at all). Then contrast,
on the other hand, a technological making which imposes a predetermined
form on matter without paying heed to any intrinsic potentialities, the way an
industrial factory indiscriminately grinds wood into woodchips in order to paste
them back together into straight particle board, which can then be used flexibly
and efficiently to construct a maximal variety of useful objects. Now, using this
same contrast, think about the difference between an educational approach that
helps students identify and cultivate their own unique talents and intrinsic skills
and capacities so as to help them meet their generation’s emerging needs (and
thereby encourages teachers to come into their own as teachers), as opposed to
an approach that treats students merely as raw materials, “human resources,”
and seeks to remake them so that they can pursue whatever society currently
deems to be the most “valuable” career path.6
In each case, it helps to think about how one responds to the resistances
one encounters: Does one seek to flatten out and overcome them or, instead,
to cultivate that which resists one’s will and so help bring it to its own fruition?
While many late-moderns continue to believe (with Nietzsche) that all meaning
comes from us (as the result of our various “value positings”), Heidegger is
committed to the more phenomenologically accurate view that, at least with
respect to that which most matters to us—the paradigm case being love—what
we most care about is in fact not entirely up to us, not simply within our power
to control, and this is a crucial part of what makes it so important. Indeed, the
primary phenomenological lesson Heidegger drew from art is that when things
are approached with openness and respect, they push back against us, making
subtle but undeniable claims on us, and we need to learn to acknowledge and
respond creatively to these claims if we do not want to deny the source of genuine
meaning in the world. For, only meanings which are at least partly independent
186 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

of us and so not entirely within our control—not simply up to us to bestow and

rescind at will—can provide us with the kind of touchstones around which we
can build meaningful lives and loves. Heidegger drew this lesson from poetry,
but it is profoundly applicable to education, where it helps us understand what I
call the pedagogical truth event.
Heidegger referred to the phenomenon of such an enduringly meaningful
encounter as an “event of enowning” (Ereignis). In such momentous events,
we find ourselves coming into our own (as world-disclosers) precisely by
creatively enabling other entities to come into their own, just as Michelangelo
came into his own as a sculptor by creatively responding to the veins and
fissures in that particular block of marble so as to bring forth his “David”; or as
a woodworker comes into her own as a woodworker by responding creatively
to the subtle weight, color, and grain of an individual piece of wood in order
to make something out of it (or to leave it be); or as, in the pedagogical truth
event, a teacher comes into his or her own as a teacher by learning to recognize
and cultivate the particular talents and capacities of each individual student,
thereby enabling these students to come into their own. In all such cases, a
poetic openness to what pushes back against our preexisting plans and designs
helps disclose a texture of inherent meanings, affordances, significations, and
solicitations, a texture Heidegger teaches us to discover “all around us”—not
only in nature, our workshops, and classrooms but even in our lives as a whole.7
For, we truly learn to “make something” out of our lives not when we try to
impose an artificial shape on them but, rather, when we learn to discern and
develop creatively that which “pushes back” in all the examples mentioned, and
many more. Fidelity to such truth events requires us to persevere in this struggle
to help unfold the ontological riches they can disclose over time.
It is here that we can glimpse the importance of “the pedagogical truth event”
for understanding the phenomena of mentoring. We can use “mentoring” to
name a crucial aspect of ontological education, namely, the teacher’s helping
the student to identify and develop his or her distinctive talents and capacities,
ideally so as to help students respond to their sense of the most pressing issues of
their time and generation. To some that might sound like a task burdened with
duties, but in fact it is amazing how little it can take. Just “as an inconspicuous
tap of the sculptor’s chisel imparts a different form to the figure” (as Heidegger
put it in What Is Called Thinking?), so a few simple but true words that recognize
and respond to something inchoate but meaningful in a student’s work can
have a profound impact. Such mentoring helps encourage students to continue
to develop the skills and abilities that make them distinctive, since it is such
 Heideggerian Perfectionism 187

development that leads to a fulfilling life, as the perfectionist tradition teaches

us. Still, this is not some wholly altruistic or other-directed action, either. On the
contrary, teachers come into their own as teachers by helping students recognize
and cultivate their distinctive skills and abilities in a meaningful way. In so doing,
moreover, teachers and students help being itself come into its own as well, as
that dynamic phenomenon that always informs and yet is never exhausted by
our poetic discernment and creative development of its possibilities.8
Heidegger’s perfectionist understanding of education suggests that the
teacher is only the foremost learner, dedicated to learning in public in order to
show by example that learning means discerning and developing ontological
possibilities, thereby helping students develop their own sensitivities to the
texture of the texts in which they live as well as their own abilities for creative
world-disclosure. This means being ready to let go of one’s lesson plan when
the opportunity to nurture potentially important discussions arise. This also
helps us see why it is advantageous not just to teach new figures and emerging
movements, but to do so while also teaching the same great texts repeatedly,
since the dedicated rereading of such texts allows one to discover something
new in them every time. That experience of learning to see something where
previously one saw nothing is the phenomenological heart of the perfectionist
philosophy of the pedagogical truth event. For, all genuine meaning derives
from and requires this skill of learning to discern and disclose the inchoate and
often inconspicuous possibilities of things.9
If intelligibility can be thought of as composed of “texts” that we continually
read and interpret (as Derrida’s famous aperçu, “there is nothing outside the
text,” suggests), then we can hear Heidegger as reminding us that we need to
learn to recognize and respond to the texture of these ubiquitous texts. This
texture of meanings independent of our wills can be more or less subtle, but by
dissolving all being into becoming, the current of late-modern technologization
tends to sweep right past it and can even threaten to wash it away, as in the
case of particle board or, much more “dangerously,” Heidegger suggests,
in the technological reengineering of human beings, even in its seemingly
milder form of educational enframing, in which a shared commitment to the
poetic discernment of genuine possibilities get eclipsed and overwritten by
empty technological optimization, getting the most for the least. Nonetheless,
Heidegger remains hopeful that once we learn to discern this technological
current (both its ontotheological foundations and its phenomenological effects),
we can also learn to cultivate a “free relation to technology” in which it becomes
possible to use even technological devices themselves to resist technologization,
188 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

that nihilistic obviation of any meaning independent of the will. In fact, we are
already using technology against technologization, I would suggest, when we
use a camera, microscope, telescope, or even glasses to help bring out something
meaningful that we might not otherwise have seen, when we use a synthesizer
or computer to compose a new kind of music that helps us develop and share
our sense of what is most significant to us, when we use a word processor to help
bring out what is really there in the texts that matter to us and the philosophical
issues that most deeply concern us, or even when we use a highly technologized
university to teach the art of slow and careful reading that is dedicated to helping
teacher and students learn to discern and develop such will-independent
meanings together.
To put the larger point that emerges here in philosophical terms, what the later
Heidegger suggests is a fundamental ontological pluralism (or plural realism). We
need to be phenomenologically sensitive enough to meanings independent of
the will to be able to “cut reality at the joints,” but because those joints provide us
with more of a suggestive outline than a final design, there will in most cases be
more than one way of disclosing the genuine hints we are offered.10 This means,
for example, that, just as a talented artisan can make more than one thing from
a single piece of wood, so there was also more than one form slumbering in the
veins of the marble from which Michelangelo “released” his David. And, for the
same reasons, there will usually be more than one right answer to the existential
question of what we should each do with our lives. That helps explain the persistent
recurrence of the question in education, since it can never be settled once and
for all, and why those looking for the one right answer never seem finally to find
it.11 Like the neo-Aristotelian view of “open resoluteness” (Ent-schlossenheit) that
Heidegger developed in Being and Time, his later view of the active receptivity
of “releasement” (Gelassenheit) suggests a phenomenological development of
ethical and aesthetic phronêsis or practical wisdom. The guiding idea here is
that, rather than getting hung up looking for the one right answer—and then,
when we finally despair of finding it, rebounding back to the relativistic view
that no answer is better than any other (or concluding nihilistically that intrinsic
meanings are an obsolete myth, thereby ignoring the multiple suggestions nature
offers us or overwriting these hints with our own preconceived ideas rather than
seeking to develop them creatively)—we phenomenological educators should
instead cultivate the recognition that in most situations there will be more than
one right answer to questions of what to do or how best to go on.
The guiding hermeneutic principle to follow—pedagogically, phenomeno­
logically, and existentially—is that there is more than one inherent meaning to
 Heideggerian Perfectionism 189

be found in things. For, if being is conceptually inexhaustible, capable of yielding

meaning again and again, then the intrinsic meanings of things must be plural
(or essentially polysemic), however paradoxical such a doctrine of ontological
pluralism might now seem, given our current obsession with formal systems
capable of securing monosemic exactitude. Indeed, to understand the being
of the entities we encounter in a postmodern way is to no longer preconceive
everything we experience either as modern objects to be controlled or as late-
modern resources to be optimized but, instead, to learn phenomenologically
to discern and creatively develop the independent meanings, solicitations, and
affordances of things, becoming vigilantly open to the multiple suggestions
things offer us, to the point of dedicating ourselves—as teachers, as students,
and as human beings—to creatively bringing forth such hints responsively and
responsibly into the world.12

Notes

1 See Heidegger 1998, 167. I explain and discuss this crucial passage in detail in
Thomson 2005, Ch. 4, esp. 155–81.
2 For some of the hermeneutical evidence and philosophical arguments establishing
that Heidegger’s ontological thinking about education forms one of the deepest
undercurrents running through his philosophy, both early and late, see Thomson
(2004) and Thomson (2005).
3 For a presentation of his earlier, Being and Time, view and its main differences
from his later understanding, see Thomson (2004) and Thomson 2005, Chs. 3–4.
4 I discuss Heidegger’s heroic embrace of the tragic truth that the known floats atop
the unknown like the tip of an iceberg above a deep dark sea in Thomson 2011,
ch. 3.
5 I explain these views in detail in Thomson 2005, Ch. 1, and Thomson 2011, Ch. 1.
6 I develop these suggestions in detail elsewhere; a genuinely vocational education
would be perfectionist, cultivating and developing essential capacities, not empty
and instrumentalizing (Thomson 2005, esp. Chs. 2 and 4).
7 Heidegger seeks to teach us “to listen out into the undetermined” for a “coming
[which] essentially occurs all around us and at all times” (Heidegger 2010, 147).
Kenneth Maly describes the tripartite “enowning” at the heart of the phenomenon
of Ereignis in terms that cleave closely to Heidegger’s own: “Things emerge into
their own, into what is own to them; humans come into their own as they respond
to the owning dynamic in being as emergence; being as emergence enowns
Dasein—all these dynamics belong to the matter said in ‘enowning’” (Maly 2008,
174). As Maly suggests, there is a third dimension of enowning in which being
190 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

too comes into its own; that happens, I show in Thomson (2011), when Dasein
and the being of entities come into their own together in such a way that being
itself is disclosed in its essential plenitude or polysemy—and this is the crucial
postmodern moment.
8 That such crucial pedagogical “events” are what most deeply matters educationally
(rather than the mere transmission of information) helps explain why teachers
are more important than topics. Different teachers have different styles and
interests, and different styles and interests disclose some students’ distinctive skills
and capacities better than others, so students should be encouraged to find the
teachers whose teaching styles and interests speak to them, calling them to put
their most into a class rather than just trying to get a good grade.
9 This is one of the central theses of Thomson (2011).
10 Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” suggests that intelligibility contains a
complex texture of edges, lines, and breaks, a “rift-structure” that forms an open-
ended “basic design” or “outline sketch” to which we need to learn to be creatively
receptive in order to bring at least one of the potentially inexhaustible forms
slumbering in the earth into the light of the world.
11 I develop this view in Thomson (2004).
12 The present chapter grew out of a keynote address I gave to the conference on
“The Future of Philosophy” at the University of North Texas, Denton on 12
November 2010. Thanks to Keith Brown, Trish Glazebrook, Carl Sachs, Dale
Wilkerson, and several others for helpful discussion on that occasion.
 12

Descent to the Things Themselves:

The Virtue of Dissent
John Duncan

In what follows I explore the classical Greek idea that to live the best life one
must understand, and live according to, the natural order of things, but I do so
from an existential-phenomenological perspective. After sketching the classical
idea, which is a core idea of classical virtue ethics, I turn very briefly to Husserl,
Heidegger, and Nietzsche, but it is Sartre who is at the center of the view developed
here—not Sartre the champion of freedom and responsibility,1 but rather Sartre
the literary-phenomenological traveler to the abyss of fundamental existential
contingency. Unlike so much of Greek—and indeed Western—thought, the
view developed here advances not by ascending to the summit, but rather by
descending into the abyss. Because the apparent order of things is grounded
in nothing other than the abyss, if we assent to it we do so for unfounded
reasons and lead unphilosophical lives. Such lives cannot be virtuous, for to live
according to an order of things would be to live according to a fundamentally
false order. Virtue, which requires understanding and living according to nature,
requires living according to fundamental orderlessness. Thus, one is obliged to
cultivate behaviors, not of assent, but of dissent, to satisfy the requirements of an
existential-phenomenological ethics of virtue.

Observing and living according to the

natural order of things

Cicero reports from Heraclides Ponticus, who attended Plato’s academy about
the same time as Aristotle, the story that a ruler named Leon was very impressed
192 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

by Pythagoras and asked him about his profession. Pythagoras said that he
mastered no art, but was a “philosopher.” In W. K. C. Guthrie’s rendering:

This word was strange to Leon, and, to explain to him what it meant, Pythagoras
employed a simile which has become famous. Life, he said, is like the gathering at
the Olympic festival, to which people flock from three motives: to compete for the
glory of a crown, to buy and sell, or simply as spectators. So in life . . . some enter
the service of fame and others of money, but the best choice is that of those few
who spend their time in the contemplation of nature, as lovers of wisdom, that is,
philosophers. (Guthrie 1962, 164)

There is a striking similarity between this simile and Plato’s view in the Republic
that there are three kinds of human being (based on the dominance in each of
one of the three parts of the soul). It is likely that either Heraclides projected
Platonic teaching on Pythagoras, or Pythagoras and his followers influenced
Plato, but it is also true that such a classification of humans, perhaps attributable
in its details to Pythagoras in the sixth-century BCE or to Plato in the fourth,
resonates in general with important strains of classical Greek culture.
Being engaged in the affairs of life, such as the pursuit of wealth or status,
there is precious little time to step back and observe life, and in general, each of
us finds himself or herself always already engaged. Thus, each is destined to live
out his or her portion of life without understanding much of it. Certainly, we
pick up the kinds of knowledge or skill needed to succeed at particular junctures
in various contexts, perhaps developing expertise in some contexts, but very few
of us have the leisure to take up questions about what and who we are and what
life and the world are all about.
That is unfortunate for two basic reasons. First, because the capacity to
understand the natural order of all things and our places in it would be a very
distinctive capacity, such that failure to exercise it would be akin to a bird
failing to exercise its capacity for flight, or a fish for swimming—amounting to
so much wasted potential in each case. Second, since knowledge of the natural
order would enable fundamentally grounded decisions and actions it would,
in a significant sense, enable the best life possible. Of course, it must be noted
that as beneficial as knowledge of the order of things would be, it would not be
found by seeking benefit, but rather by stepping back from the pursuit of benefit
and by contemplation of natural order. The attempt to understand, not in order
to achieve some practical goal, but in order to understand, aims to achieve no
practical goal and so is no means to an end. It is useless, serving no purpose—it
is an end in itself.
 Descent to the Things Themselves 193

There is something importantly right about actualizing the potential to

achieve an end in itself, as well as making decisions on the best grounds possible,
and it is indeed unfortunate if only a few are able to do so.
Even though there are many important differences between classical Greek
society and our own, including many differences in the way we go about doing
philosophy, not only the general point about stepping back from the affairs of
life in order to better understand its nature, but also the details about wealth and
status, are useful points of departure for an existential-phenomenological ethics
of virtue.
The highly spirited princes in the Iliad and Odyssey stand behind the
simile’s conception of the robust honor that comes with the victory of a polity’s
strong-willed competitor in the public and martial Olympic games. The spirit
of Achilles, which sometimes does and sometimes does not submit to the
wisdom of Athena, for example, drives much of the Iliad. In the Republic, such
spiritedness must be given its due—that is, given the status of steadfast defender
of the city-state, executor of its policy, the honor-driven public official, the
paradigm for which is the honored soldier.
Behind the action of the Iliad and Odyssey, behind the spirited princes, are
the many individuals who produce the goods and services of life, from farmers
to artisans of all kinds, whether independently or in the service of princes.
Driven by the desire either to survive, or to enjoy the luxury that comes with
wealth, this activity must also be given its due, as the economic class in Plato’s
Republic.
Today, market and officialdom are arguably the two most important systems
within which “we live and move and have our being,” to borrow one of Hegel’s
favorite passages from the “Acts of the Apostles” (Harris 1995, 9). In many
ways, these two systems define the antipodes of the Cold War period, pitting
Western market capitalism and Eastern state socialism against each other, but
it is clear that “the capitalist economy relies on organizational performances
of the state,” and “the socialist planning bureaucracy has to rely on the self-
steering performances of the economy” (Habermas 1989, 86). Thus, even
though it triumphed over state socialism at end of the Cold War, capitalism
itself necessarily “swings between the contrary policies of ‘the market’s self-
healing powers’ and state interventionism,” as Habermas and many others have
argued (86). Even the individual firm requires administrative structures, just as
political and other administrations are in crucial interrelationship with markets,
as only the most ideological refuse to admit. In general, we are always already
engaged in the two great systems of market and bureaucracy, and each of us is
194 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

pursuing wealth or status, so that we have precious little time to step back and
contemplate life. But for a few, for those for whom wealth and status are not as
pressing, there is the call of wonder. They may step back from and contemplate
the whole business. In so doing, they begin to understand the patterns at the
very ground of the systems of wealth and status, as well as those at the very
ground of the cosmos and nature itself. In this sense, the details of the simile
continue to be relevant.
In the most general terms, the classical idea is both that the natural order
of things may be understood and that there could be no better way to live than
according to it.
In Sophocles’ Antigone, King Creon, the leader of the polity must deal with a
political crisis that involves his own extended household. Because the household
is managed according to its own logic, distinct from the logic of political affairs,
the orders of the household and the polity are not the same. Thus, Creon’s
political crisis involves a major clash of orders. When he chooses the political
over the household, he fails to give the household its due. His failure to pattern
his judgments and actions according to the natural order of the household
generates a reaction from that order, leading ultimately to death upon death
in his household. Thus, Creon suffers from the order he fails to follow, and in
so doing, he learns. Very near the end of the play, the Chorus says to Creon, “It
seems you have seen too late what is right.” Creon replies: “Yes, I have learned it
to my bitterness” (Sophocles 1991, 1347–8 [Translation modified]). In the closing
lines of the play, the Chorus notes that “Wisdom is far the chief element in the
best life [ευdaimonίaς]”—that is, faring well in life arises from understanding
well. “But” the speechifying and “great words of haughty men,” which outpace
genuine understanding, “exact/in retribution blows as great” as wisdom, and so
“in old age teach wisdom” itself (1420–4 [Translation modified]).
If Creon is taught the hard way, by suffering the disastrous results of failing
to act according to the natural order of the household, Sophocles’ audience is
taught a gentler way, by observing and understanding the order Creon failed to
follow. The spectator looks on, “qεwrεin” in classical Greek—to be a spectator,
to observe or contemplate—a word at the root of the English “theory.” To
theorize in this sense is to be a spectator, to step back from involvement in the
affairs of life in order to observe and contemplate them, which is to participate
in the philosophical life. The ideal philosophical education, as sketched by Plato
in the Republic, reaches its summit with a complete vision and understanding
of the order of all things. If one were provided with the leisure to step back
from the affairs of life in order to be “schooled” (a word descended from the
 Descent to the Things Themselves 195

classical Greek “σcolή,” meaning “leisure”) in the complete order of all things,
one might attain the very summit, from the perspective of which one would
live as fully as possible according to the natural order of things. That would be
simply “splendid,” purely “beautiful,” utterly “good” (Symposium, 211c; Republic,
508d–509c),2 and it would include the least suffering possible.
For Aristotle, because reason is the most distinctive feature of human nature,
the best possible life for a human being (which must be a life in accord with
its nature) is a life in accord with reason. Thus, virtue is the sort of behavior
that exemplifies reason, including regularity and measure (Nicomachean Ethics,
1106b36–1107a2).3 Furthermore, although each kind of thing does best by
actualizing its natural potential, there is no actualization better than the rational
life of contemplation, which requires an active divine intelligence available only
to humans and gods. Again, as in the simile, only the few are capable of any sort
of sustained contemplation at this level, and so most of us must make do with
merely practical virtues learned from experience within a virtuous polity.
Returning to the details of the simile, there seem to be very many who are
motivated primarily by acquisition, many who are motivated primarily by
honor, and a few who are motivated primarily by wonder. The best arrangement
would be to encourage the first group to constitute the economy, the second
the civil service (including police and military), and the third the rulers as an
observing, contemplating, and policy-generating think tank. This was a goal
Plato discussed at length, but also one that he thought might be extremely
difficult to achieve or to maintain if ever achieved. When we live according
to natural order we live well, and when we constitute the polity in a way that
enables each individual to live according to natural order, we all live as well as
we could, generating the virtuous polity.
In the most general terms, the excellence or virtue of our existence is to live
according to the very nature of that existence. Failure to understand that nature
makes suffering more likely. Understanding arises from stepping back from
the pressing cares of, and observing, existence.

Phenomenological observation and description

Beginning “in the natural attitude”—the attitude of our everyday experience,

taking things just as we run into them—Husserl famously describes experience,
allowing himself to “say I for himself and state . . . what he finds quite
individually” (Husserl 1983, 51 note 2). We imagine Husserl sitting at his desk,
196 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

but stepping back from the task of putting reasons, arguments, explanations,
etc., into prose and taking the time to observe and describe experience—not
dealing with problems in a particular academic subfield, but rather withdrawing
from them and turning to the things of experience itself.
According to “my seeing, touching, hearing, and so forth . . . corporeal
physical things with some spatial distribution . . . are simply there for me,
‘on hand’ . . . whether or not I am particularly heedful of them,” he informs
us (Husserl 1983, 51). Although I have not paid attention to the phone this
morning, it remains integral to my lived experience, “on hand” in case I should
need it. But it is “not necessary” that such things “be found directly in my field
of perception” for me to experience them quite naturally. For example, the things
that are behind me remain part of my experience, “there for me as determinate,
as more or less well known, without being themselves perceived” (51). I do not
take my bookcase to be either in a lesser state of existence, or distinct from my
experience whenever I am facing my desk, turned away from the bookcase. I
continue to experience it as quite fully real and available—on hand—even while
I do not perceive it. The bookcase and many other things both in my office,
and even just outside of it, constitute the “constant halo” of the “copresent” (52).
Furthermore, beyond what is now both in my field of perception (the phone) and
within the halo of the copresent (the bookcase behind me), there is the “horizon
of indeterminate actuality” (52). Although the things of this horizon are much
more poorly known than those of the copresent, their availability, their being on
hand, is not doubted. Even though I am not sure what buildings, etc., there are
on the other side of campus, sitting in my office I experience them as neither less
real than, nor more disintegrated from the experience of, my bookcase, phone,
and desk.
Along with other features, the perceptual field, the copresent, and the horizon
of indeterminacy co-constitute “my surrounding world” (Husserl 1983, 53).
Husserl’s step back from, and observation and description of, things just
as we run into them discloses a unique phenomenological domain. Hitherto
unremarkable experiences of everyday things become philosophically interesting.
Although philosophy in general involves a withdrawal from the affairs of life in
order to say something about what is the case, phenomenology in particular
steps back and turns explicitly to observation and description, both echoing,
quite clearly, the classical Greek connection between philosopher and spectator
and orienting the philosophical project to the things themselves, opening the
way to a possible virtue ethics rooted in the real world of experience.
 Descent to the Things Themselves 197

I now turn briefly to Heidegger and Nietzsche before proceeding to Sartre

and his existential-phenomenological ethics of virtue. What I am working
toward in Sartre arises out of what I have sketched from Husserl, but also
out of elements of Nietzsche that are best approached from a Husserlian-
Heideggerian—that is, a phenomenological—backward-looking glance.
Always already engaged in my surrounding world, my being is “being-in-the-
world,” following Heidegger. I encounter things not as a spectator observes and
describes them, but rather as an agent who, always already dealing with practical
affairs, runs into more or less useful things “ready-to-hand” (Heidegger 1962,
98). Neither do I step back to observe and describe particular things, nor do I
explicitly observe the contexts of practical affairs they co-constitute. However,
when a thing becomes unusable in some way, its readiness-to-hand collapses,
to be replaced by “presence-at-hand”—it becomes “conspicuous.” If my phone
stops working, I no longer employ it as a means to some end. I find it “thrust to
the fore,” a useless thing that brings to a halt the progress of my task, displacing
me from the world—from the referential totality of means and ends into which it
used to fit ready-to-hand. Nudging me out of, and disclosing to me, that totality,
the “worldly character of what is within-the-world” is “lit up” by means of the
conspicuous thing (102–7).
As being-in-the-world, it is by means of the conspicuous thing that the
implicit nature of my quotidian world begins to become explicit. But the world
that surrounds my being is difficult to grasp adequately, for it extends to the
very limits of our epoch, which Heidegger describes as the technological
epoch. Fundamentally, we encounter the many and various beings of our world
“including ourselves . . . as actual or potential force” (King 2009, 103). Everything
is thoroughly malleable—for example, wilderness is to be developed, behavior
is to be modified, and opportunities are to be exploited. The beings of our world
are available to us as technological beings in this sense. A very particular mode of
availability, the technological presentation of beings, which gives us our epochal
world, is such that “human beings . . . live under the assumption that there is no
limit to the realization of human will” (103).
By means of what conspicuous things might the implicit nature of the
technological epochal world begin to come into view? Heidegger argued that
under the sway of technology, “there is danger in the highest sense,” for that in
virtue of which the technological world is available to humans is not some force
subject to the human will. The availability of beings as technological beings has
happened, and continues to happen, to humans. Under the sway of technology,
198 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

not only do we forgot that we encounter the many and various beings of our world
as the beings of a particular kind of epochal world, but also the fundamental
happening to us of being is deeply “disguised” by the technological assumption
of prowess (King 2009, 106). Thus, the great danger is that we technological
humans will be unable to recognize that the availability of beings happens to
us. The happening to us of the availability of beings is “the being of beings.” The
being of beings is that happening “by virtue of which beings become and remain
observable” (Heidegger, as quotation appears in King 2009, 108).
However, Heidegger continues, quoting Hölderlin, “where danger is, grows/
The saving power also” (Heidegger 1977a, 309–10). As the danger grows, it
becomes more conspicuous and we step back and contemplate technology itself,
and in so doing we begin to experience the epochal happening of being, and may
turn to its home, the happening of being as such.4
Here, Heidegger was influenced by Nietzsche, for whom the cultural epoch
was dominated by the Socratic illusion that existence was ultimately both
intelligible and remediable—very similar to the technological epoch of thorough
malleability identified by Heidegger in the succeeding century. Socrates held
firmly to the view that existence was intelligible and fundamentally oriented
to the good, even if this could be fully comprehended only by divinity. From
the perspective of this imagined viewpoint, a perspective that would exceed
existence itself, one could judge existence—even attempt to fix it—which would
amount to “Socratism,” or the illusory “optimism” of “theoretical man,” in
Nietzsche’s terms.
If a culture believes the illusion that anything may be understood and
reformed in theory, then theological, philosophical, or scientific theory will
eclipse its world, resulting in the reign of theoretical man. However, the illusion
of knowledge, being an illusion, eventually runs up against its own limits, for the
unintelligible is the case, as we shall see.
For Nietzsche, “the disaster slumbering in the womb of theoretical culture
gradually begins to frighten modern man,” and as the danger grows, modern
man “searches in agitation among the treasure of his experiences for means to
avert the danger.” But it has been the greatest theorists of theoretical culture,
“great men of versatility,” who “have meanwhile been able with incredible
level-headedness to use the tools of science itself in order to lay bare the limits
and relative nature of knowledge itself and so to deny decisively the claim of
science to universal validity and universal goals” (Nietzsche 2000, 98). This
alone has revealed the truth about theoretical culture’s scientistic optimism,
that is, that science, and its leading category of necessary causation, cannot in
 Descent to the Things Themselves 199

fact reveal the ground of all things. “The delusion which presumed to fathom
the innermost essence of things with the aid of causality was for the first time
recognized for what it was”—as delusion. “The great audacity and wisdom of
Kant and Schopenhauer succeeded in winning the most difficult victory, the
victory over the optimism” that constitutes “the substratum of our culture,” that
“had believed that all the enigmas of the world could be known and fathomed,”
and that “had treated . . . causality as . . . the most universal validity.” What had
been taken to be the ultimate reality of modern scientific culture, that is, causally
ordered empirical reality, “Kant revealed,” was actually “the mere phenomenon,”
“making real knowledge” of the essence of things “impossible,” and, “according
to an expression of Schopenhauer’s, lulling the dreamer into a deeper sleep.”
But, “with this knowledge”—that is, knowledge of the limits of knowledge—“a
culture is introduced which I dare to describe as tragic” (98–9).
Nietzsche argued that a “rebirth of tragedy” was needed in Germany
(Nietzsche 2000, 86; §16), and he understood the origin of that possibility to
be located in an increasingly frightening “danger,” as well as in the theoretical
work of Kant and Schopenhauer. From the perspective of theoretical culture
itself, Kant and Schopenhauer showed that our legitimate knowledge is based
on categories, but the categories are not applicable to things in themselves. Thus,
there are limits to knowledge. Science is fundamentally limited by what it cannot
grasp, and it cannot grasp the very ground of a thing’s existence in the thing in
itself. Existence exceeds science.
Forging the path Heidegger would later retrace, Nietzsche argued that as
it became increasingly difficult to ignore the dangerously problematic nature
of the theoretical epochal world, conditions emerged for a new form of tragic
observation that might avert disaster.5
The Sartrean view to which I now turn has roots both in the Nietzsche
sketched here and in the Husserl sketched above. I deal with the Husserlian root
in the next section, the Nietzschean in the following one.

Sartrean phenomenological realism

From his earliest studies in philosophy, Sartre “decided in favor of realism.”

He felt that “any theory which did not state that consciousness perceived
exterior objects as they were was doomed to failure” (Beauvoir 1988, 157).
This philosophical stance was folded into a critical-cultural project to oppose
bourgeois hypocrisy and conformism and to expose the many realities they
200 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

evaded and concealed. What Sartre called his “opposition esthetics” took shape,
at first, without either philosophical detail or political engagement—those
would come later (Beauvoir 1959, 341–2; Beauvoir 1983, 134–5; Sartre 1978,
31–4). As Beauvoir reports, Sartre “set out to prove that men were . . . bodies
of flesh and bone, racked by physical needs and crudely engaged in a brutal
adventure that was life” (Beauvoir 1959, 336–7).
To a great degree, Sartre’s opposition esthetics were formed in his encounter
with literary realism, the works of which he studied during his early and brief
teaching career, and which included Celine, Dos Passos, and Kafka (Beauvoir
1983, 136–7, 186–7). He gave public lectures on the genre, including one in
which he argued that stream of consciousness literature lent itself to “an absolute
realism” (Cohen-Solal 1987, 94; also see Beauvoir 1983, 138, 185). He was
looking for a literature that would oppose the very feel of real lives to bourgeois
hypocrisy—not the meticulous descriptions of an academic realism, but the
revelation of the things themselves of life itself.
Increasingly, he became “attracted by what he had heard about German
phenomenology,” and when his friend Raymond Aron, who had been at the
French Institute in Berlin studying Husserl, told him that with phenomenology
he could “describe objects just as he saw and touched them, and extract
philosophy in the process,” Sartre began to work on going to Germany to study
Husserl. “In the end it was that which made me go to Germany, when I was told
that Husserl . . . had a way of grasping the real just as it was” (Beauvoir 1983,
135–6).
In Berlin during 1933–34, Sartre wrote two essays on Husserl. The
long Transcendence of the Ego would be published in 1936, the very short
“Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology” in 1939.
Sartre rejected what he saw as the central epistemological view of the prevailing
philosophical wisdom taught to most of his generation, that the object
experienced is not the object as it is in itself, but is rather representational
contents of consciousness constituted by the subject’s own mediating—
“digestive”—processes (Sartre 1970, 4). Husserl avoided such idealism
(transcendental or otherwise), or so Sartre believed at first.
Husserlian “intentionality” was Sartre’s crucial “discovery” in Berlin. With
respect to “intentional consciousness,” he said later, “I was absolutely pro-
Husserlian” (Sartre 1978, 29–30). For Husserl, “intentionality is the name of
the problem encompassed by the whole of phenomenology. The name precisely
expresses the fundamental property of consciousness” (Husserl 1983, 146)
 Descent to the Things Themselves 201

which is “to be consciousness of something” (84). Sartre embraced Husserl’s

intentional view because it did not reduce objects of experience to “digested”
“representations” or “contents of consciousness.”

Against . . . digestive philosophy . . . . Husserl persistently affirmed that one cannot

dissolve things in consciousness. You see this tree . . . just where it is: at the side of
the road, in the midst of the dust, alone and writhing in the heat, eight miles from
the Mediterranean coast. (Sartre 1970, 4)

Sartre agreed that conscious experience was consciousness of an intentional

object, but he went on to argue that consciousness expended itself completely
in its object. Consciousness is what it is by fundamentally transcending itself in
its other—the object. “There is nothing in it but a movement of fleeing itself, a
sliding beyond itself ” (Sartre 1970, 4). This imagery is intended to push what we
might imagine to be the very process of consciousness beyond the limit of any
process at all. Being nothing but intentionality as such—not even a process—
consciousness is “the absolute existent by virtue of non-existence” (Sartre
1957, 42). A mouthful to be sure, but the idea is that intentionality cannot be
encumbered by anything at all, not objects, structures, processes—nothing—for
it is awareness, and the least bit of awareness must be awareness through and
through, not awareness and also something opaque (about which there would
be awareness). That in it which was opaque would not be aware, and that in it
which was aware would not be opaque. Awareness and substance of any kind are
mutually exclusive. Consciousness is the awareness of things, not a thing itself. It
is nothing. As a mode of being, nothingness alone is that with respect to which
beings appear.
Sartre went to Berlin to study Husserl because of a strong commitment
to realism—to describe the things themselves of life itself—and he found in
Husserl’s conception of intentional consciousness a mode of being that was
hurled into the world as awareness. However, as Sartre immersed himself in
Husserl, he also found tendencies toward idealism. Convinced by, and excited
about, the realist tendencies, and critical of the idealist ones, Sartre found
himself criticizing the latter from the point of view of the former, performing
a virtual self-critique of Husserl from the perspective of which he maintained
a phenomenological realism, which would become the center of his mature
existential phenomenology.
In Transcendence of the Ego, Sartre rooted himself in a radically pure version
of Husserlian consciousness that rejected idealism, and he resisted what he took
202 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

to be a tendency in Husserl to weigh down consciousness with an immanent

ego. Such an ego would threaten realism. Consciousness inhabited by an ego
(no matter how formal) would be a mediating—“digesting”—consciousness
first and foremost. In awareness, it would meet only the representations it
constituted, products of its own digestive activity. Effectively, it would be aware
of nothing but itself—that is, of the results of its activity—and so potentially slide
into that form of subjective idealism called solipsism. However, Sartre insisted
that any substance—even formal egological substance—was inconsistent with
consciousness as intentional, which meant that consciousness must be pure and
so exhaust itself completely in awareness of its object, not tangle itself in the
mediating processes of any egological entities (See Beauvoir 1983, 182–3).
In the brief final section of Transcendence of the Ego, Sartre defended his
conception of phenomenology against charges of subjective idealism coming
from the “extreme left.” Phenomenology, the most “realistic” philosophical
movement in “centuries,” has “plunged man back into the world.” As long as
consciousness “is purified of the I,” it “no longer has anything of the subject. It
is no longer a collection of representations” generated by digestive mediation
(Sartre 1957, 104–6). With the expulsion of the subject from consciousness,
solipsism and idealism are rejected. Later, he would say: “This is no longer the
subject in Kant’s meaning of the term, but it is subjectivity itself. . . . Henceforth
we have escaped idealism.” (Sartre 1966, 17).6
Husserl’s descriptive approach to everyday experiences and objects attracted
Sartre (with his commitment to realism), but realism was a procrustean bed for
Husserl, and so it propelled Sartre through Husserl to his own phenomenological
realism. As I indicated above, Sartre’s realism was folded into a critical-literary
project from the beginning, which itself would culminate in his novel Nausea,
worked on extensively during the year in Berlin. Nausea takes the form of a
diary, really a series of dated entries gathered from a collection of notebooks in
which the author, Antoine Roquentin, describes and contemplates a string of
bizarre experiences he is undergoing. Roquentin’s first entry begins as follows:

The best thing would be to write down events from day to day. Keep a diary to
see clearly—let none of the nuances or small happenings escape even though they
might seem to mean nothing. And above all, classify them. I must tell how I see
this table, this street, the people, my packet of tobacco . . . (Sartre 1964, 1)

Evident here is phenomenological attention to the things themselves of life itself,

an attention the novel will pursue all the way to the abyss of contingency—our
proximate destination for a virtue ethics of dissent.
 Descent to the Things Themselves 203

Sartrean literary phenomenological descent

About as early as Sartre was working on realism, he was also working on

fundamental contingency. Whereas he worked through a reading of Husserl to
stake out his realism, his view of contingency developed through a reading of
Nietzsche.7 As was the case with his study of Husserl, Sartre’s study of Nietzsche
resulted in both convergence and divergence.
Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy bears interesting comparison with Nausea. The
Birth of Tragedy opposes a nineteenth-century German culture of unfounded
optimism with an esthetic that both deranges itself in the dreadful Dionysian
music that resonates with the blind striving power underlying all things and
also restores itself with the charming Apollonian arts of representation. Sartre’s
Nausea opposes twentieth-century bourgeois hypocrisy with an esthetic that
both reveals the radically disturbing fundamental contingency of all things and
moves forward via a literary project. Underlying both texts is the abyss—blind
striving power and fundamental contingency. Both oppose their respective
cultural contexts—unfounded optimism and bourgeois hypocrisy. And both
move through and toward esthetics—through a unique style of philosophical and
philological writing from tragedy and music to representational art (including
epic), and through the novel to the novel as a kind of music. At the level of the
overall aims and structures of the works, there is at least this much convergence
between The Birth of Tragedy and Nausea. The fundamental orderlessness of
all things is opposed to a cultural order oblivious to orderlessness, and the way
forward involves both experiencing the orderlessness and new esthetic creation.
However, Sartre rejected the strains of romanticism he detected in Nietzsche.
In 1929, during his final year of university, student contributions were collected
for Les Nouvelles litteraires. In his contribution, Sartre argued: “There is no such
thing as . . . [Nietzsche’s] will to power. Everything is too weak: all things carry
the seeds of their own death” (Beauvoir 1959, 342–3). Whereas in The Birth of
Tragedy, Nietzsche argued that tragedy’s revelation of “indestructibly powerful
and pleasurable” nature impressed the heroic Greek spectator with a kind of
“metaphysical” confidence, Sartre’s revelation at the heart of Nausea of the
natural groundlessness of all things provided no such confidence. Sartre would
portray a nature whose ground was nothing but contingency, without any strains
of romantic expression, and rather than find heroism in the tragic, he disclosed
the real tragedies that inevitably undid heroism.
In the brief defense of phenomenology that Sartre advanced against the charge
of idealism at the end of Transcendence of the Ego, he wrote of “metaphysical
204 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

materialism” as an “absurdity” (Sartre 1957, 105). A fundamentally contingent

realism is incompatible with a metaphysically ordered—that is, a determined
or mechanistic—materialism. It is a materialism of sorts—certainly not an
idealism—but a materialism unordered by universals. In a discussion of Sartre’s
philosophical conversations with Aron (probably in late 1929), Beauvoir informs
us that he

went to unheard-of extremes in his total rejection of universals. To him general

laws and concepts and all such abstractions were nothing but hot air: people, he
maintained, all agreed to accept them because they effectively masked a reality
which men found alarming. He, on the other hand, wanted to grapple with this
living reality. (Beauvoir 1983, 31)

Unlike proponents of the doctrine of realism with respect to universals,

proponents of nominalism, realism’s contrary, are wary of the language of the
philosophical proposition. Indeed, Sartre felt he “had to replace [philosophical]
proposition by [literary] demonstration,” Beauvoir tells us (44–5).
As we have seen, the commitments to what the early Sartre called his
opposition esthetics were deeply literary. Thus, the full realization of the
project motivating him during these early years would only come with the
folding of his phenomenological realism (sketched in the Transcendence of
the Ego) into a literary exposition that revealed the things themselves of life
itself. The result would be, as I have called it elsewhere, a realism-all-the-
way-down.8
Of the variety of streams Nausea follows to the sea of contingency, I discuss
three here, dealing with the Other, narrative, and things in general. Crucial in
each case is the phenomenological realism sketched above, now folded into a
literary project. Both behind Nausea, as author, and in Nausea, as narrator, Sartre
engages in the observational and descriptive practices of phenomenological
realism, bringing his reading audience to a literary revelation of the orderlessness
at the ground of all things.
Intermittently, throughout Nausea, we are presented with Roquentin—diary
author, narrator, and protagonist—being assaulted by disturbances emanating
from the things of life—for example, stones and glasses of beer. The disturbances
are central to the growing disillusionment he is suffering, pushing him to the
margin of society.
The first stream to the sea of contingency I discuss deals with the Other. About
a third of the way into the novel, we find Roquentin reflecting on his situation
in a small, nearly empty, quiet, and very simple restaurant-tavern. A Monsieur
 Descent to the Things Themselves 205

Achille, a slight man, comes in from the cold and sits down to order a drink. He
is a street person, or very nearly one—someone without any status or family,
unsure of himself—and he inadvertently makes a casual remark to the waitress,
“just to say something,” but it offends her. M. Achille tries to recover and laugh it
off, but the stalwart waitress walks away unappeased. “Everything is silent again:
but it is not the same silence” (Sartre 1964, 65).
Sartre’s phenomenological realism is actualized in the diary entries of his
literary character Roquentin, whose observation and description disclose the
essence of each recounted event—imparting the very feel of how M. Achille and
his inadvertent remark produce disorder. After some time in the overwrought
silence, it appears to Roquentin that the “little man” is about to address him,
perhaps seeing in him the mark of a fellow-traveler of the margins. But just as
that is about to occur, everyone is unexpectedly distracted by the entrance of the
local doctor, a huge man who exudes the sense of capability, confidence, status,
and authority. M. Achille “raises his head with a smile of relief. And it is true: this
colossus has freed us. Something horrible was going to catch us. I breath freely:
we are among men now” (Sartre 1964, 65–6).
The waitress had been caught off-guard by M. Achille’s remark, as had
M. Achille himself, and Roquentin was losing hold of the order of things—
three relatively inconsequential subjects caught inadvertently out of a familiar
milieu. But then the aura of assurance and authority rushed into the room,
immediately containing the disorder and anxiety emanating from M. Achille.
The doctor is a man of consequence, a man of experience, a man. He never
finds himself out of his milieu because he radiates it wherever he goes. The
doctor does not see M. Achille when he enters, but soon enough the waitress,
“with a nod of her head . . . points out the little man” who himself “would like
to catch the doctor’s eye.”

“So it’s you, you old swine,” he shouts, “aren’t you dead yet?”
He addresses the waitress:
“You let people like that in here?”
He stares at the little man ferociously. A direct look which puts everything in place.
He explains:
“He’s crazy as a loon, that’s that.”
He does not even take the trouble to let on that he’s joking. He knows that the
loony will not get angry, that he’s going to smile. And there it is: the man smiles
with humility. A crazy loon: he relaxes, he feels protected against himself; nothing
will happen to him today. I am reassured too. A crazy old loon: so that was it, so
that was all. (Sartre 1964, 66–7)
206 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

Bourgeois culture labels M. Achille in order to put him in the place it has reserved
for loons—part of the ongoing reproduction of its order. The relief generated by
the doctor contrasts with the palpable and uncomfortable disorder generated by
M. Achille.
Through Roquentin, Sartre retrieves the disorder and holds it up against all
that the doctor represents. The doctor has come to believe in the “experience” he
has accumulated over so many years. He speaks unassailably because he speaks
from the heart of his culture, which must put loons in their places. Success has
given the doctor stature enough to believe that his past experiences are applicable
to whatever comes his way. But success neither guarantees truth nor lasts. As the
novel will reveal, the world is fundamentally ineffable, and the doctor’s power is
already ebbing, as he trudges the final leg of his life-journey. “The doctor would
like to . . . hide . . . the stark reality.”

The truth stares me in the face: this man is going to die soon. . . . Each day he looks
a little more like the corpse he will become. That’s what their experience leads
to. . . . It is their last defence. . . . And this terrible corpse’s face! To be able to stand
the sight of it in the glass he makes himself believe that the lessons of experience
are graven on it. (Sartre 1964, 69–70)

The doctor will die, as will everyone, and lose his authority in the process,
something from which he can hide for only so long, but in addition, his
authority is fundamentally illegitimate. M. Achille has been unable to make
sense of the world—he has been unable to fit into it, except of course by
tolerating its judgment that he is a crazy loon, which provides him with a
relatively unthreatened patch of ground on the margin (as long as he is careful
not to offend waitresses, etc.). Like Roquentin, M. Achille is uneasy about
things, and his uneasiness is not unfounded, as the novel proceeds to reveal.
Neither Roquentin nor Achille is a loon. Each has found, or been found by the
uneasiness of things, which the general ideas of bourgeois culture—rolling off
the tongues of the experienced—dismiss. Rather than ask M. Achille a genuine
question about his concerns, which might very well lead to disconcerting
realities, the doctor dismisses M. Achille to the category of kooks.
The dismissal of the Other stands out as a conspicuous tactic, not genuine
engagement with real concerns. Signaled by the Other’s anxiety, real threats to
mainstream conformism and hypocrisy are sleeping uneasily below the surface,
and increasingly, Roquentin is being disturbed by them.
I turn now to the second stream to contingency, dealing with narrative.
Roquentin suffers a protracted crisis of narrative in the novel. He comes to believe
 Descent to the Things Themselves 207

that narrative, which is ubiquitous, distorts the real. Consider that in real life,
when one acts, the future is unknown—“That’s living. But everything changes
when you tell about life; it’s a change no one notices.” In narrative, “you seem
to start at the beginning: ‘It was a fine autumn evening in 1922. I was a notary’s
clerk in Marommes.’” But “in reality you have started at the end.” Ever-present
uncertainty with respect to the future cannot be excluded from the experience of
real events, but within the narrative, “instants have stopped piling themselves in
a lighthearted way one on top of the other.” Rather, “they are snapped up by the
end of the story which draws them and each one of them in turn, draws out the
preceding instant,” all the way back to those first few sentences. In the story that
we tell “we forget that the future was not yet there” in the living of the original
experience. Roquentin admits: “I wanted the moments of my life to follow and
order themselves like those of a life remembered. You might as well try and catch
time by the tail” (Sartre 1964, 39–40).
Roquentin comes to realize that the historical figure about whom he is
writing a book lived a life, like all people, in the face of uncertainty, etc., not as a
life remembered. But it is as a life remembered that he must write the book. He
comes to realize that the way we socialize by telling each other stories about our
various adventures, for example, or even about minor occurrences, invariably
anticipates the end throughout, and displaces the uncertainty, or turns it into
drama. He realizes that if he were asked who he was—what was his story—an
answer would be expected that connected the events of his life into a coherent
and purposeful narrative. And if he could not provide such an answer, he might
very well be marginalized as a crazy loon like M. Achille.
Thus throughout the novel, narrative (in historical writing, which is
Roquentin’s current profession, in social storytelling, and in the sense of one’s
lifestory) becomes a more and more conspicuously incredible device that fails to
describe the real. Real life is difficult to grasp, perhaps fundamentally ineffable,
and its narrative ordering is as illegitimate as the marginalization of M. Achille.
Finally, I turn to the third stream, which deals with things in general. About
three-quarters of the way through Nausea, the rising tide of uneasiness reaches
a climax and Roquentin is overwhelmed. He reels through town until he arrives
at a bench in front of a chestnut tree in a city park. There he experiences the
source of the uneasiness: reality as utterly groundless—the contingency of
existence. With a sometimes halting, sometimes throbbing swell of descriptions,
Roquentin’s surrounding world is disclosed as a disconcerting wasteland of
patchy, viscous, and thing-like existents. Including some of the most excerpted
passages from Sartre’s literary oeuvre, and running for about eight pages, the
208 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

encounter with existence is a literary-phenomenological descent to an abyss that

both resembles a weakened9 version of “the will” in Schopenhauer and the early
Nietzsche and challenges the Kantian view that existence is not a predicate. In
the past, Roquentin tells us,

when I looked at things . . . they looked like scenery to me. I picked them up in
my hands, they served me as tools. . . . If anyone had asked me what existence was,
I would have answered . . . that it was nothing, simply an empty form which was
added to external things without changing anything in their nature. And then all
of a sudden, there it was. . . . It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category:
it was the very paste of things, this root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the
root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished: the diversity
of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had
melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder—naked, in a frightful,
obscene nakedness. (Sartre 1964, 127)

As an attempt to draw the reader into Roquentin’s experience of existence, the

full encounter cannot be summarized. Essentially, no system of concepts can help
Roquentin to contain this oily paste because it is not fundamentally conceptual.
Why all of this stuff goes on existing from hour to hour is incomprehensible.
Inexplicably, stuff just keeps exceeding itself. It exists unnecessarily.

The essential thing is contingency. I mean that one cannot define existence as
necessity. . . . No necessary being can explain existence: contingency is not a
delusion, a probability which can be dissipated; it is the absolute, consequently, the
perfect free gift. All is free, this park, this city and myself. (131)

Existence precedes all things. It is irreducible. Unformed, rife with contingency, it

leaks through putative universals, general laws, and metaphysical explanations.
During one of his last evenings in the city of Bouville, about a week after
undergoing the experience of contingent existence in the city park, Roquentin
climbs a hill, looks down on the city, and considers its citizens:

They are not afraid, they feel at home. All they have ever seen is trained water
running from taps, light which fills bulbs when you turn on the switch, half-breed,
bastard trees held up with crutches. They have proof, a hundred times a day, that
everything happens mechanically, that the world obeys fixed, unchangeable laws.
(Sartre 1964, 158)

However, patterns that have proved dependable for some time are not immutable
structures of being. Those who take them to be so are mistaken. Contingent
 Descent to the Things Themselves 209

existence remains there with them in the nature of things. “I see it, I see this
nature. . . . I know that its obedience is idleness, I know it has no laws: what they
take for constancy is only habit and it can change tomorrow” (158). Because it
is contingent to the core, and so not held fast by rational form, existence might
cease at any moment. It might blink, flutter, slowly decompose, or limp on. Or
it might go crazy.

What if something were to happen? What if something suddenly started throbbing?

Then they would notice it was there and they’d think their hearts were going
to burst. . . . Or else nothing like that will happen, there will be no appreciable
change, but one morning people will open their blinds and be surprised by a
sort of frightful sixth sense, brooding heavily over things and seeming to pause.
Nothing more than that: but for the little time it lasts, there will be hundreds of
suicides. (158–9; also see 76–7)

Roquentin’s descent is to the disconcerting observation and description of the

orderlessness of all things, which belies the pretence that there is a fundamental
order. On the way, observations and descriptions of the past, of our daily
adventures and misadventures, of our lives, and of the Other, have all disclosed
realities that exceed our familiar stories and concepts. Withdrawing from the
epochal world of bourgeois hypocrisy (not to mention the epochal worlds of
theoretical man and technology), and turning to contemplation of contingent
existence (not to mention the will and being), dissension arises and conformism
and the mainstream decline.

The virtue of dissent

Phenomenological observation and description descend to groundless existence.

Particular and initially describable affairs of the world are ultimately undone
by the descent, because utterly shameless existence exceeds description itself.
Orderlessness lies at the heart of the things themselves and constitutes the
unreasonable agent intellect of existence. In virtue of existence itself, dissent
enabled by descent to the things themselves is fundamental and available.
It encircles us, but to be at home in it we have to acknowledge, and explicitly
step into, its circle. It is our task to cultivate fundamental dissent, not in order
to destroy, but because it is at the heart of what we are. Actualizing dissent in
accordance with our nature involves the appropriate exercise of, for example,
210 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

withdrawal, hesitation, uncertainty, dubiousness, skepticism, and nonconformity

and also sours the temptations that all too often lead us to dangerous personal
and social flights from the real.
Actualizing dissent would require us both to observe broadly and to attend to
particulars and others with care, edging our way out beyond familiar stories and
concepts, and leaving conformism and the mainstream behind.
Of course, there are many kinds of dissent already at work in our world.
There is the truncated dissent that arises in the face of a conspicuous problem.
For example, people may oppose a legal loophole that enables problematic
behavior. But if the loophole is removed, the dissent dissolves as quickly as
it arose, and withdrawal from the affairs of life, experience of the real, and a
slackening of epochal enthrallment are unlikely. There is also the polarized
dissent of animosity for which every act of the opposition becomes nothing
but a symbol of its malevolence. Sides square off against one another, and the
animosity constitutes opposing ranks of apparatchiks. Here dissent continues
for some time, but again withdrawal, the real, and epochal slackening are
unlikely. Fundamental dissent edges out beyond familiar stories and concepts.
It is involved in many instances of the more limited kinds of dissent, including
truncated and polarized dissent. Some members of every movement of dissent,
however limited, do find themselves edging outward. For example, between the
polarities of Washington and the Tea Party movement on the one hand, and Wall
Street and the Occupy movement on the other hand, there is animosity to be sure,
but many contributors to the two dissenting movements are edging out beyond
the familiar, discovering new disconcerting realities beneath their conceptions
of the state and the market. And as indicated above, the systems of wealth and
status—capitalism and bureaucracy—are so deeply rooted that dissent with
respect to them, perhaps more than with respect to any other system, promises
withdrawal, the real, and slackening of epochal enthrallment.
Those who dissent withdraw from the mainstream. They create new
(nonmainstream) voices. They contribute to the democratization of the polity.
The multiplication of voices complicates decision-making, but decision-making
that does not heed voices is not fully democratic decision-making. Much of
the promise of democracy, still unfulfilled, must be won through dissent, and
existence enables dissension in favor of the real throughout the polity, edging
us out beyond the Greek view that only the few may both understand, and live
according to, the natural order of all things.
In fact, only dissent can save us, for it is the virtue of existence.
 Descent to the Things Themselves 211

Notes

1 On which see my “Sartre’s Pure Critical Theory” (Duncan 2009).

2 References to Plato in this chapter are to the texts as they appear in:
Plato. 1961. The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington
Cairns. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
3 References to Aristotle in this chapter are to the texts as they appear in:
Aristotle. 1984. The Complete Works of Aristotle, 2 vols, ed. Jonathan Barnes.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
4 On this reading of Heidegger, see King (2009), as well as my discussion of King
(Duncan 2010).
5 On this reading of Nietzsche, see my “Culture, Tragedy and Pessimism in
Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy” (Duncan 2006).
6 Consciousness without the subject is mere “subjectivity”—that is, awareness alone,
which is included in the bundle of features traditionally attributed to a subject.
7 For sources supporting the Nietzschean influence, see Duncan 2005, 100–2.
8 See my “Sartre and Realism-all-the-Way-Down” (Duncan 2005) and Hendley’s
critical discussion of it (Hendley 2010).
9 Weakened—that is, deromanticized. See above in this section.
 13

Correlates of the Good Life:

Body, Wilderness, and Expertise
Paul Gyllenhammer

A trademark feature of virtue ethics is its focus on flourishing as the basis of an

excellent life. I bring this focus into dialogue with phenomenology by showing
how the natural attitude limits our well-being because of the way it takes reality
as something given, ordinary, and stable. As a remedy to this problem, I discuss
avenues of engagement that help foster in us more open, enthusiastic, and
responsible dispositions, which, in turn, allow us to relate to things, others, and
ourselves in more fulfilling ways.
After a discussion of the danger of the natural attitude, I turn to the
dispositional virtues of enthusiasm, sympathy, and tolerance—dispositions that
are necessary for being engaged in the world in a deeper way. Then, I focus on
three objects that add depth to our lives: our own lived-body, the wilderness, and
socially responsible expertise. Although these “objects” are quite distinct from
each other, each object (1) requires the dispositional attitudes of enthusiasm,
sympathy, and tolerance to be appreciated and each object, when so appreciated,
(2) adds excellence to our lives because of the goods each object has to give us.
When our natural attitude, that is, our taken for granted flow of life, forgets to
nurture our relationships to the body, wilderness, and a focused expertise, our
lives are not as excellent as they could be.

The problem of the natural attitude

Other than the structure of intentionality, perhaps the most well-recognized

phenomenological notion is the natural attitude. For Edmund Husserl, the
natural attitude has to be understood as entangled within a multiplicity of home
 Correlates of the Good Life 213

horizons, all of which are naively taken for granted or given as if natural (see
Luft 1998). These home horizons may be referred to as regions to the degree that
we can isolate and distinguish them from each other, for example, school, work,
restaurant, automotive highway, etc. Each region has its own particular field
of engagement, and our attitudes are adjusted when we enter them. But these
home horizons are so familiar to us that we often do not realize that we operate
within them.
The natural attitude is both a descriptive feature of our engagement with
things, others, and self and a problem. Descriptively, the natural attitude
indicates the way that humans become so engrossed in their activities that they
lose sight of the fact that all regions of engagement are mediated by a historical/
temporal horizon. Also missing from the natural attitude is an awareness of
the fact that regions are made possible through individual action, making the
person a constitutive force in the meanings that hold sway in the world. Both of
these oversights are rooted in way that the natural attitude operates: it takes as
a given what is actually a correlational product. Why this is a problem for our
well-being will be highlighted in just a moment.
In the phenomenological attitude, we are brought face-to-face with
dimensions of reality that are overlooked, forgotten, or underappreciated in the
natural attitude. One such dimension is the way that things display themselves
from out of a manifold of intentional relationships.1 A common example is the
plot of a novel. Although the plot is in the text, we have to accept the fact that
the plot does not exist all on its own. The plot reveals itself through the finite
intentions of the reader. Different readers, with different historical backgrounds,
can pick up different elements of the text that alter the overall significance of
the story. Because of this horizon of difference, the object displays a density that
appeals to my curiosity. As I hear about various interpretations of the story, I am
surprised that I missed this significance and go back into the text to see if such
a reading is possible.
I single out this interpretive flow of objective identification because it helps
us move into the question of virtue ethics. Most basically, virtue ethics is
concerned with our ability to become better than we are or to flourish. Virtue
ethics depends, therefore, upon our appreciation of the flow of interpretive
objectification, where our embodied relationship to things is the focal concern.
Modifying Robert Sokolowski’s notions, we can distinguish between cumulative
and additive notions of flourishing, fulfillment, or well-being.2 Cumulative
dimensions to well-being have to do with changing ourselves deeply, as might
happen when someone overcomes a destructive addiction. The often slow and
214 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

painful changes such a person makes ultimately lead to a fundamental alteration

that we can refer to as healthy growth.
The additive dimension to well-being is related to the cumulative but does
not include the bodily depth dimension. The additive can be seen as a moment
of inspiration, which dramatically affects a person, but nothing changes in terms
of the person’s overall sense of self. Additive moments of well-being, however,
are quite significant because they offer affectively enriching events that provide
the momentum to go back into our normal lives. Such occasionally uplifting
moments add something to our lives, even if they do not alter our embodiment
from the ground-up. More importantly, these uplifting moments can be the
impetus to engage in a practice of cumulative well-being, so they are the gateway
experiences to a newly formed embodiment.
How we feel in terms of our overall well-being is a fundamental concern for
all people. Even a scientist obsessed with an experiment must be concerned
about her well-being, as the ability to do effective research will be negatively
influenced by an impoverished embodiment. Husserl realizes the importance of
our overall affective disposition when he discusses orthoesthetics (Husserl 1989,
71). This theme has been taken up by others outside the phenomenological
tradition under the headings of care for the self and somesthetics.3
Despite the fact that our well-being should be a focal practice (discussed
below), we easily lose sight of it because of the natural attitude. The natural
attitude presents itself as a threat to our overall bodily and mental health because
it sees the world as a given rather than a product. Unless we recall that we are
active forces that give meaning and shape to the world, we are easily lost in the
destructive stasis of our mundane, daily lives. If we do not establish fundamental
goals as a way to reinvigorate our lives, then our stagnant existence will leave us
empty rather than full, bored rather than passionate, sick rather than healthy.
Of course, the beauty of life lies in the fact that different ways of engagement are
available at all times and that these ways are the openings to virtuous living. But
to have these different ways of engagement existentially available means that the
subject is herself responsive to the possibilities of change. This responsiveness
requires the dispositional virtues discussed in the next section.

Enthusiasm, sympathy, and tolerance

Analogous to texts, all objects have a density and richness that can provoke a
renewed appreciation of them. As we discover them, we are left in awe of all
 Correlates of the Good Life 215

that they have to give us. Of course, the density of objects is often overlooked
because of the familiar horizon of engagement that renders the world around us
as ordinary and boring. Apathy is a sure sign that something is going wrong in
our lives. Thus, we need to seek ways to break down the barrier of the natural
attitude and to provoke again a spirit of wonder. Here, I take as a guide Albert
Borgmann’s account of a focal object, which generates the virtues of enthusiasm,
sympathy, and tolerance (Borgmann 1984, 176–82).
A focal object is any object that solicits a primal enthusiasm, promotes
sympathy with others, and requires tolerance. All three notions are correlative
since the enthusiasm we experience is derived not only from the excitement
we have in a deeply rich object, but because this discovery calls out to be
shared with others. Others are called on not merely as witnesses to a focal
object; they help us understand the phenomenon more fully. And because
others are called on to participate in the discovery, the need for tolerance
arises in at least three ways.
First and foremost, focal objects require patience or tolerance because we
need to focus on them. This means that we need to disburden ourselves from
other concerns—concerns that may interrupt the focus needed for a deeply
rich object. Second, when I reach out to others in my enthusiasm about a focal
object, hoping they will sympathize with my discovery, other people may not
immediately understand why I find this object exciting. Here, a potential hostility
can arise between people since objects of enthusiasm are not always recognized
as mutually significant. In this case, tolerance is demanded from me for the
simple fact that others are not the same as me. I must be patient during this
time of miscommunication with the other. Third, tolerance is needed because
a focal object is discovered through avenues of involvement or focal practices.
Since these avenues can be opened to me by others, I must be willing to listen to
others, following their directions, if I truly desire to find a way into the object. As
I engage the object, a different form of embodiment is required from me, which
is something I must also learn to cope with as part of the discovery process.
It is important to stress the fact that sympathy and tolerance are made possible
by the virtue of enthusiasm. Only when I am enthusiastic about a discovery will
I be able to engage in the practices of sympathy and tolerance with others and
myself. But enthusiasm is a strange phenomenon. On the one hand, enthusiasm
is given to me from a focal object. It makes no sense to be enthusiastic without
an object of wonder. Yet, it is often the case that objects worthy of enthusiasm
are not recognized as worthy by us. So, being an enthusiastic person is something
we need to work on as well. Perhaps we can describe this as the need for being
216 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

open to discovery, which is part of the way that enthusiasm is generated. And
developing a spirit of openness to new discoveries will be a main point addressed
in the next section on the lived-body.

Nurturing a space for the good in the body

The awareness of mortality is a distinctive trait of human beings. This is

apparent in the way that we deal with time. When time is wasted, we become
depressed, angry, or frustrated. Wasting time is something humans try to avoid,
since we cannot get life back once it has passed. But this level of seriousness
is not something we always have with us. As children, we want to play all day,
not realizing that there are things to do before our time is over. As adults, the
demands of everyday life occupy us so fully that we fail to dwell on the need
to care for ourselves. The naïve attitude of childhood, as well as the forgetful
attitude of adults, is broken in many ways. I am either educated into or reminded
of the reality of death through the loss of a close friend or family member. I
am educated into or reminded of the reality of death by a violent accident that
almost kills me, or, by the natural decay of my own body through aging. All such
events can trigger a primal care for the self, where the illusions of invincibility
and stasis vanish in a concern for my own fragility. Such flashes of anxiety,
horror, melancholy, grief, etc., bring out of me a call to virtuous behavior. I must
stop wasting my time and do something worthwhile before I am gone. The need
for the good is dramatically set in motion by reckoning with the oblivion that
awaits us all.
Although we never know the time and place of our death, we can attempt to
hold it off for as long as possible. A fundamental way of doing this is to recall
that the human body is itself a focal object that offers itself as an infinitely dense
object of discovery and renewal. Indeed, even if we do not choose to respect the
body as a focal object, it will let us know that it is there to be respected. What I
mean is that our bodies have needs, and if we do not listen to them, it will find
a way to tell us to respect them. The ancient Greek and Hellenistic philosophers
were correct when they took the emotions as signs, as a kind of language, of
our present state of being. How much pain has become normal? How much
frustration and disharmony? More importantly, how can we address and treat
these pains and these feelings of lack and disharmony?
If we wish to abstract the body from its involvement with the world, and
focus our attention on it as a being unto itself, we can reduce the goods of the
 Correlates of the Good Life 217

body to proper exercise and diet. As the ultimate basis for everything else we do,
if the body is ill, not strong, all else will suffer. So, I would simply declare that
to prepare a space for the good in the body requires that we care for the health
of the body itself. Here, we can consult physicians, dieticians, yoga instructors,
etc., for advice and guidance into the myriad ways that the body itself can be
reattuned in its overall being. To find such a reattunement requires, of course,
an engagement with a particular practice—a practice that has been established
by others, and that offers an avenue of discovery into my own body. The body is
clearly a focal object worthy of awe, but it requires tolerance to listen to others
about how the body may be improved. Then, as we engage in a practice, we must
be able to tolerate the practice, since it is rarely easy to transform the body. Over
time, tolerance, in the sense of “having to put up with,” transforms into tolerance,
in the sense of “developing an acceptance of.” Out of this latter stage, we may
experience an improvement in our very being. To eliminate a lack or a pain
through diet and exercise is to fill in a void, allowing us to feel more whole and
alive. And even when we do not realize we are lacking or in pain, engagement in
a practice of bodily health shows us what we were missing. Thus, bodily health
practices are always enticing as a path of self-discovery, particularly when we do
not think we need any help.
But nurturing a space for the good in the body is accomplished not merely
through diet and exercise alone. Indeed, we need to take notice of the way
that the human body is fundamentally dynamic so that even the smallest
changes can have dramatic affects on our well-being. Husserl is a helpful
guide in this regard.
Under the heading of passive synthesis, Husserl describes the embodied level
of sense that originally orients us toward things. There are affective forces that
draw us toward and drive us away from objects in the world (Husserl 2001,
196ff.). We know this realm of passive synthesis is real because we can witness
the way in which our own bodies are habitually responsive to the world. In
times of great distress, we can even hate our own bodies because of a sense of
powerlessness before it.
Traces of our earliest experiences remain in our present through habits.
And these present traces, as forces, become evident to us when we strive to
describe the form of our relationship to the world. Such descriptions require
us to take stock of the home-worlds in which we once did, and currently do,
participate for they shape our lives so deeply. Of course, gaining insight into
these realms of participation is difficult and requires rather dramatic events
to disclose (a foray into the wilderness is discussed below). Yet, even without
218 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

gaining a so-called deep comprehension of our participation in a home-world,

we can easily appreciate the dynamic nature of our habits. Habits, although
established forces, are always open to alteration through an alteration in the
surrounding context. As evidence, we can recall the way that strange contexts
become familiar just by dwelling in them.
When we are first in a new surrounding, the affective force of the whole
situation is one of strangeness, confusion, uncertainty, even fearfulness. Our
bodily gestures reflect this tension to others who witness our actions. It takes
time for us to acclimate, so that the flow of the present can proceed harmoniously
or automatically. When we become accustomed to the situation, the strangeness
dissipates and a background sense of familiar orientation takes over, making the
abnormal context normal.
But what is more important than this dynamic process of making the strange
familiar is the fact that qualitative changes or optimizing experiences can occur
through a change of contexts. For example, if someone attends a performance
by the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall, what can capture the
listener’s attention is the way that the sound of the music presents itself so
differently from recorded music. There is a dynamic fullness arising from the
rich harmony of instrumentation that is missing from the listener’s familiar or
normal relationship to the composition. Moreover, witnessing the skill of the
musicians, sensing their presence in their performance, and being gripped by
the fact that the music is living in and through us at the moment, all add to the
drama of a live piece. And through this kind of experience, we can meaningfully
distinguish between the normal, the abnormal, the anomalous, and the optimal
(see Steinbock 1995, 123–47).
Prior to a qualitative change, the normal may not be recognized as anything
but what is fixed, natural, or given, as mentioned in the introduction. We
may never question it since we never sense anything but it. Once there is
an alteration—an anomaly—in the field of normality, and whether this
anomaly is productive or destructive, the familiar is then (tacitly) raised to
awareness.
If the alteration is positive, as in the fullness and drama of the music when
played live, the once familiar world, that is, the familiar recording of the music
listened to at home, is recognized to be lacking or qualitatively abnormal
when compared to the present encounter. The joy experienced in the live
performance—which is announced through the body’s responsiveness, for
example, “goose pimples”—is derived from its status as a productive anomaly.
When the performance is over, the person is left with a sense of an ideal—the
 Correlates of the Good Life 219

optimal—that stays with her and which she desires to share with others out of
sheer enthusiasm.
Of course, this process can work in reverse, as when a live performance
is marred by a lack luster performance, poor seating arrangement, or other
aspects of the context. The live music appears, then, as a negative anomaly,
and the recordings the person listens to at home are taken as the optimal in
this case.
From this example, we can see that the optimal can operate as a reality and
an ideal. When based on an experience we once had, the optimal is obviously
something factual. On the other hand, the optimal is never something that
we actually possess. When understood as a relation between the body and a
context of involvement, the optimal is something that appears and passes away.
The optimal is elusive and displays itself only when the conditions are right. The
optimal is like, without the metaphysical implication, the Platonic good that
governs our lives from birth to death. After sensing it, we chase after it, although
it may be hard to find again.
What is nice about Husserl’s focus is his concern with the subject’s experience
with changes in the norm. Husserl, in other words, can meaningfully discuss
how an embodied norm is idiosyncratic at times, and how a change in that
normative horizon can be deeply good for the individual, even if nothing of
significance has changed in the social or statistical levels. This is a key point
for my understanding of virtue ethics. At this point, I am more concerned
with finding avenues of renewal—avenues for being open to the rich diversity
of life—rather than some definitive path to ultimate well-being. And the path
into affective-evaluative renewal is paved by our appreciation of the dynamic
nature of our embodied selves. We need to alter our surroundings in order
to find renewed relationships. We need to “put ourselves out there,” upsetting
the balance of our normal lives. We need to test the boundaries of our senses
of sight, smell, taste, hearing, and touch—indeed, our whole syn/kinesthetic
sensibilities—as means to disclose objects in more optimal ways. As Merleau-
Ponty says, “We must rediscover . . . the fact of my subjectivity and the nascent
object, the primordial layer at which both things and ideas come into being”
(Merleau-Ponty 1962, 219). This “primordial layer” is, for both Husserl and
Merleau-Ponty, the joyful point where the body is first enticed to change
through a new perception of an emerging object (cf. Husserl 2001, 290).
Developing a tolerance for change is itself a training to respect the inherent
bodily power of transcendence, which grants us more opportunities to sense
the good. Such training is a source of life rather than stagnation and death. By
220 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

experiencing more, the body itself is presented with objects that can add new
paths of discovery and enrichment to our lives. Once a discovery is made, an
opening into a new focal practice is offered as a choice.

The wilderness

Although qualitatively richer senses of the good arise through our active
involvement with our home-world, actually leaving our culturally saturated
horizon of familiarity offers even more dramatic alterations in our appreciation
of the good. In this case, the wilderness is a region unlike others for the main
fact that it reveals itself as other than culture. In phenomenological terms, the
wilderness is a region that brings about a suspension of our normal activities and
commitments in such a way that the natural attitude, understood as our taken for
granted home-horizon, does not operate again until we leave the wilderness.4
In what follows, I will limit my account to the way the wilderness contrasts
with life within a technologically advanced society. There are three virtuous
experiences I wish to reveal in this regard: (1) an enriching challenge to our
wants, desires, and sense of participatory beauty; (2) an affectively profound
sense of self-forgetfulness; (3) an opportunity to commune with the ultimate via
the mood of the sublime.
First and foremost, entering the wilderness requires planning. Leaving the
comfort and security of normal life cannot be taken lightly since the forces of the
wilderness are violent. So, at the very start, there is a heightened need to respect
the power of nature in a way that we do not normally consider in our daily lives.
The comfort and ease of daily life is thrown out of balance by the predictable
and unpredictable circumstances of the wild. Of course, even without leaving
society, the violent forces of nature can radically interrupt the normal flow of
life. But here I am talking about the deliberate choice to disrupt the flow of life as
a virtuous way of challenging our sense of self and surrounding world.5
As we prepare to enter the wild, we are not just challenging our practical
skills; we are simultaneously challenged to reattune our desires and wants.
Since we cannot expect the same things in the wilderness as we do at home,6
we must foresee the need to do without such objects and amenities. Often,
we can hardly imagine how much we need these things until we are without
them. The wilderness brings these almost unconscious desires to the surface.
Indeed, many people simply cannot shut down—to use Epicurus’s words—the
unnatural and unnecessary desires that are created in our society, making it
 Correlates of the Good Life 221

impossible to tolerate the wilderness. Although the exact limit to “unnatural

and unnecessary desires” is ambiguous, it is time spent in the wilderness that
allows us to understand them in some determinant way. The wilderness forces
these realities onto us, which is an important tool in choosing our own way of
life. The wilderness is, then, a vital way to practice our freedom to the degree
that it brings us back to a reflection on what we are (insofar as our passions
reflect our being) and who we can be. Through this confrontation, a useless
obsession can be revealed, which allows us time to be free from the objects that
nurture the obsession.
Of course, the wilderness does not only present cumulative challenges to our
sense of being; we choose to enter it for the almost spontaneous beauty it has to
offer. Here, being engulfed is the phenomenological experience I would like to
focus on in more detail. This experience is a gestalt shift from our home-horizon
in which we are also engulfed, but in a way that we do not sense as immediately
because of our familiarity with that horizon. So, let us try to reveal this level
of participatory beauty through three contrasting experiences with existence in
our home-world.
First, unlike experiences of beautiful art works, which take us out of daily life
in framed, safe, and limited ways, nature is an inexhaustible source of awe because
there is no institutionally created frame that directs our appreciation or comfort.
In all directions, the wilderness offers avenues of surprise, adventure (Tafalla
2011), and challenging objects of esthetic appreciation. Regarding the last point,
the wild offers even revolting phenomena as objects of esthetic value simply
because they are part of the way nature works. Since there are no institutional
values or artistic intentions to criticize or blame for nature’s ugliness, the factual
aspect of nature’s brutality strikes us as emotionally powerful and simply not the
same as authored forms of ugliness.7 In this sense, the wilderness allows us to
become emotionally charged by things that our culture rarely takes as worthy
of representation. The sanitizing frame of culture is recognized to be unnatural,
at least to the degree that esthetic images in modern society tend to offer ideal
types rather than reality.
Second, and related to the first, we are literally engulfed in the splendor of
the wilderness because it is sensed explicitly by our bodies. The smells, sounds,
sights, tastes, and touch of things are entirely distinct from our engagement with
things in the “big city.” Our sensibilities are alive because of the contrast with our
normal way with things. Thus, even though the environment is different, we are
nonetheless attuned to it because of this difference, sensing our belonging to the
environment more viscerally than in our familiar home-world.
222 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

Third, and perhaps most important, the reason why we can be engulfed in the
splendor of the wilderness is because the wilderness is not populated by other
people. The absence of others allows us to lose ourselves into the environment,
which is experienced as a release from the pressures of social life. This lack of
social pressure is felt like a great weight lifted off of our whole being. I would
venture to say that entering the wilderness is a way to find the goodness (rather
than alienation) inherent to the anonymous consciousness that occupies so
much of Sartre’s early phenomenological descriptions. By loosening the grip of
the “look of the other,” which, for Sartre, brings about intra- and intersubjective
hostilities, we are released from the mechanism that brings about senses of
shame, self-loathing, guilt, as well as acts of sadism and masochism.
This is not the place to critique Sartre’s phenomenology of “the look.” Here, I
simply want to point out that Sartre’s concern with this phenomenon is brought
about by the very real pressure we feel through the judgments of others. Given
this fact, there is a dramatic affect we experience in the wilderness due to the
distance we gain from the coercive framework of social expectations. Sometimes
this release of pressure manifests itself in the seemingly primal urge to run naked
into a body of water. But more generally, in the wilderness we lose our sense of self
by relating to a realm of life that does not look back at us in judgment.8 And the
peace we gain from this self-forgetfulness grants us the opening to participate
with nature in a free, embodied way.
Of course, no matter what sense of self-forgetful harmony we find in the
natural environment, that moment cannot last too long for there is always the
demand for safety that arises. Even when there is no immediate and present
danger, the inhospitable threat of nature makes us focus on creating a place of
safety before it is too late. Although this problem is the ultimate reason we need
to leave the wilderness, it is in the tension between beauty and violence where we
can commune with the ultimate via the mood of the sublime.
Kant and Schopenhauer famously describe two ways that the sublime mood
arises in us: the mathematical and the dynamical (see Young 2005). These
are really two sides of the same coin, as both revolve around the way that the
person is riveted by a disturbing peacefulness. In the mathematical form of
the sublime, the person is overwhelmed by something so immense that it is
existentially incomprehensible. In the dynamical sublime, the person recalls his
or her powerlessness in the face of a greater force. For an example when the two
coincide, we can use Kant’s famous reference to the “starry heavens above.”
In the desert, on the ocean, or in an expansive field, deep into the night,
under a nearly moonless sky, it is natural to be overwhelmed by the stars. The
 Correlates of the Good Life 223

night sky has a tremendous impact because it is the closest we can get to being a
witness to our place in the cosmos.9 Obviously, in the “big city,” the sky is more
like a ceiling given the way the electric lights reflect off the atmosphere. Indeed,
the night sky is almost never a focal object for city dwellers because it is not
present to us.
The sublime nature of the night sky is more than just a perceptual thing—like
all things, it is a hermeneutic encounter. Thus, the stars strike me because I grasp
them through what others have taught me about astrophysics: the nature of the
big bang, the expanding universe, the odd possibility of a multiverse. Here, the
absolute marvel that I am, for a brief time, a spectator to this manifold of being
affects me in a deep way. This last point is crucial because it reveals the way that
the ultimate brings about the sublime mood.
In our daily life, a loss of connection to ultimate reality is common. We get
so caught up in achieving specific and institutionally created goals that basic
facts of our existence are overlooked, even suppressed: humans cannot fully
know, control, or outlive the “Being of beings.” I am not suggesting that human
achievements in the arts and sciences are futile endeavors. In fact, as we shall
see in the next section, they are perhaps the greatest sources of the good! But
when confronted with the immensity of the cosmos—as that out of which we
come and to which we go (the Being of beings)—an admission of powerlessness
to comprehend, control, and own “it” is the only honest response. We are each
radically finite beings, and in coming to terms with our own finite being, the
sublime arises as a response to that which is greater than us. We become attuned
to the fact that we are datives of manifestation (see Sokolowski 2000, 61–5),
through whom the cosmos is revealed as radically other and overpowering. As
Julian Young says at the end of his essay on the sublime: “[O]ne realizes with
Shelley and the Buddhists that ‘I am nothing’; not a ‘substance’ but a mere
incident in Being’s venture. One realizes that the only agent is Being itself, that
one is, qua ego, merely its conduit” (Young 2005, 142).10
Although this reckoning with finitude (death, comprehension, and power) is
alarming, there is nonetheless a strange sense of calmness and empowerment.
Standing at the intersection of being and the self, we are emotionally charged
because, against the backdrop of all the dead and absent beings in history, we
have some time left in the world. We are brought back to an appreciation for our
lives—the absolute beauty of living and breathing at this instant.
Such a “moment of vision,” to use Heidegger’s phrase, may not alter our being
in a cumulative way, but it is an enthusiastic openness to re-engage the world
more deeply when we emerge from out of the wilderness.
224 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

Socially responsible expertise

Although the sublime isolation gained from being in the wilderness is a source of
the good, it cannot be endured too long. There is an existential need (discussed
below) to find a place in the world, where the development of this place is
made possible through society. Here, a human ethos is revealed in the way that
becoming an expert11 in a field of knowledge or discipline is (1) existentially
grounding and (2) a socially responsible practice. Both ideas will be explained
in this final section.
An expertise forms us into a particular type of person and grounds us in an
objective region of the world. Both claims are related to the way that an expertise
is an embodied affair. An expert drummer, for example, develops a bodily
second nature, where the objects of the field of drumming become extensions of
the body itself. In this sense, the body takes on a form unique from others who
do not have the skills to use the objects inherent to the field. Drummers have
physical abilities to respond to certain objects properly, as well as the endurance
necessary for engaging the objects. The body literally takes on the shape of a
drummer and finds its interests, desires, and imaginative projections framed
by the skill. Correlatively, because the body is formed to work seamlessly with
the field of instruments and objects, the person finds a home or ground in the
mastered field.
The ground I am referring to is not merely a descriptive aspect of experience;
it is a normative dimension and part of the quest for the good life. In this
sense, finding a ground must be seen in relation to the existential struggle with
alienation. If alienation is fundamentally a mood of “not feeling at home,” and if
this mood is an integral part of the human drama, then developing an expertise
is an important therapy for this ailment.12 By becoming skilled or conversant
with a discipline, we commune or harmonize with a part of reality, which not
only gives content to our sense of self but grants us access to a community of
like-embodied subjects.
Of course, given the time and commitment it takes to develop a skill, no
human being can be a conduit for too many realities. Vagueness and ambiguity
dominate when we engage regions outside of our specialized fields. Out of
this fact we find our place within a larger community. Because expertise is
both magnifying and limiting, there is a mutual dependence between experts.
A profound responsibility, therefore, rests on us to become and maintain an
expertise because of this communal need. To the degree that expertise is a
necessary condition for optimal encounters with all focal objects, and to the
 Correlates of the Good Life 225

degree that focal objects are an integral source of meaningful engagement with
the world, then we must have people who develop and maintain a committed
relationship with such objects. Those who give themselves to developing an
expertise in a focal object are doing the important work of humanity. And given
the way an expertise helps us find a unique place on the Earth, it is a significant
source of healthy growth.
A final, more theoretically oriented point about expertise can be made
that will bring us full circle. Near the beginning of the chapter, it was stated
how the natural attitude tends to hide the objective-interpretive nature of a
home-horizon. It takes as given what is actually (1) a product of culture and
(2) dependent on the constitutive power of a subject. The notion of expertise
captures these aspects of reality to the degree that objects of focal concern are
handed down to us by a history of committed engagement, while also being
dependent upon living individuals who have a honed ability to keep them
functioning within a home-world. We can also see that the phenomenological
focus on the evaluative origin of the objective world (through the study of
passive synthesis) is coordinated with a quest for the good life or virtue. Since
any and all focal objects are taken up by people who care about revealing their
significance to themselves and others, objective insight is made possible by
the enthusiastic engagement with objects that are worthy of awe and respect.
Virtue has given us reality and virtue can keep us passionate about discovering
more about reality.

Afterword

The focus of this chapter has been on, broadly speaking, a care for the self.
Each object discussed brings about some degree of flourishing in the life of the
subject. But as we have seen in the limits of the wilderness, a subject’s well-being
is not something that can be found alone. Yes, a focal concern with oneself via
bodily health and isolation is deeply significant. But finding a place in the world
through expertise is the higher good that these other forms nourish. Indeed,
if we do not appreciate our social belonging as a greater good than our own
isolated development, then the boundaries testing that is recommended in the
sections on the body and wilderness can go awry rather quickly. Perhaps what
is needed is a further account of ethical expertise as a background condition
for a proper way to test the limits of the body, discover the value of wilderness/
isolation, and appropriate a skill from a historically constituted discipline.
226 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

Notes

1 Sokolowski establishes three fundamental structures of intentionality, which are

clearly recalled in the phenomenological attitude: wholes and parts, presence and
absence, identity in manifolds (Sokolowski 2000, 22–42).
2 Additive and cumulative fulfillments describe the way that human perception is
teleologically oriented toward the thing itself (Sokolowski 2000, 39–40).
3 Richard Shusterman’s excellent account of somesthetics draws a connection to
Foucault’s care of the self (Shusterman 2000).
4 Of course, this claim does not fit easily into Husserl’s view of the natural attitude,
since there is a relationship between the natural attitude and Husserl’s concern
with the general horizon of the “lifeworld” (cf. Luft 1998, 162–3).
5 Obviously, this virtuous challenge would not apply to people who are in desperate
need of protection from the wilderness.
6 Given the rapid advancement of mobile technology, it becomes easier to bring
the comforts of home into a wilderness region. Yet, this is precisely the way to miss
the value of the region itself. Rather than viewing nature as something to keep
out with our technological devices, we need to seek a way to find a place within it.
Sarah Pohl discusses the importance of “responsible simplicity” (Pohl 2006).
7 The esthetics of natural ugliness is an incredibly interesting subject, but one I
cannot develop here. For an excellent overview of the debate, see Brady (2010).
8 Although nonhuman animals can be a threat to me in the wild, the threat is
fundamentally different than the more psychologically complex “look” of the
human other.
9 Watching images on a screen of the Earth from outer space is an all too mediated
perspective, which eliminates the existential mode of dwelling on the Earth itself.
10 I find it terribly misleading, however, to refer to Being as an “agent.” Such language
easily draws us into a speculative metaphysics that answers the question of being
rather than letting it be the open force that brings us into the sublime mood.
11 Here, I am not talking about either “everyday” expertise or “ethical” expertise.
I am targeting the level of expertise that arises from a commitment to a particular
field of knowledge or discipline. Hubert Dreyfus and Stuart Dreyfus provide a
blueprint for the stages inherent to developing an expertise in a particular region:
novice, advanced beginner, competence, proficiency, expertise (see Dreyfus
and Dreyfus 1991). It is beyond the scope of this chapter to develop the debate
between “cognitive” and “noncognitive” accounts of expertise.
12 I phrase this hypothetically since I do not have room in this chapter to provide
convincing phenomenological accounts of alienation.
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 Index

action 12, 14–27, 34–5, 37–8, 40, 48, 50, Beauvoir, Simone de 117–18, 124–5,
52, 57, 68, 71–2, 74, 76, 78–88, 127–8, 173, 199–200, 202–4
90, 93, 100, 103, 105–6, 111, 118, being in the world 115–16, 126, 156,
121, 129–30, 133, 135, 139–40, 165, 197
142, 146, 148–58, 160–1, 165, Borgmann, Albert 215
167, 187, 192–4, 213
see practice character 5, 15–17, 23, 25, 60, 70–1,
see performance 74–6, 78–9, 83, 85–8, 90, 92,
actuality 11–15, 17, 19, 65, 135, 174, 193, 113, 117–18, 124–9, 139–40,
195–6, 205, 209–10 159, 166, 168, 171–2, 175
affection 32, 36, 60, 70 character trait 1, 15, 60
affectivity 29–34, 36, 52, 54–5, 57, 78–89, charity 50, 109–10, 145
92–3, 100, 103–5, 132, 139, 214, intellectual charity 109–10
217–20 childhood development 166, 168, 170,
auto-affectivity 30–2, 26 176n. 7, 178n. 14, 216
affordances 148–51, 154, 156–7, choice 13–15, 22, 52, 78–83, 85–8, 90,
159–60, 186–9 99–100, 102, 105–7, 117, 120,
agency 18, 21, 102, 106–8, 112, 116, 119, 129, 137, 139, 192, 220
123, 155, 165–6, 168–75, 178n. 20 Christianity 29, 38, 43
ethical agency 175–6 Christian ethics 29–30, 37, 40, 158
goods of agency 106–8, 112 Christian virtues 30, 39, 41
of agency 5, 106–7, 165, 168, concupiscence 40, 44n. 11, 93,
170–1, 175 134, 144–6
virtues of agency 168–75 confidence 71, 74–5, 77, 110, 166,
angst 54–6, 59n. 15 168–73, 175, 203, 205
antitheoretical 114, 118, 129–30 self-confidence 166, 171
appearance(s) 81, 208 constitution 24, 58n. 6, 71, 148
cultural appearances 9, 15 courage 6, 52–3, 110, 126, 141, 166,
appresentation 62, 66, 71, 73–4 171–5, 178n. 22
appresentational content 62–3, 66, 69, creativity 5, 166, 171, 173–6
73, 76 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi 4, 151–3,
appropriation 31, 38–9, 43 161n. 7
Aristotle 2–3, 9–28, 57, 60–1, 68–70, cultural appearances 9, 15
74–7, 78–94, 106, 113, 115, 117,
121–2, 124, 126, 128, 135, 140, de Beauvoir, Simone see Beauvoir,
146–8, 150, 153, 155, 160–1, 166, Simone de
178n. 22, 191, 195, 211 deliberation 12–13, 23–6, 79, 83, 87–8,
Augustine 39, 138 120, 154–5, 157–8
auto-affection 30–2, 36 deliberative activity (deliberative
autonomy 108, 170 process) 106, 121
autotelic action (auto-teleology) 147–8, dependence 92, 116, 224
153–4, 158 Depraz, Natalie 35
240 Index

Derrida, Jacques 124, 128, 182, 187 friendship 60–77, 81, 84, 92, 111
desire(s) 13–15, 18, 22–5, 44n. 11, 52, complete friendship 60–1,
55, 78, 80, 82–4, 87, 90–1, 100, 64, 68–77
105, 107, 111, 116–17, 122, fulfillment 6, 16, 35–7, 64, 67, 138, 213
138, 145, 152, 184, 193, 215, evidential or evidentiary
220–1, 224 fulfillment 64, 68, 73, 102, 105
dialectic 45–6, 54, 79, 178n. 18 intentional fulfillment 62, 101
disimpropriation 29, 37, 41–2 fundamental ontology 29–30, 32, 35
distributive justice 111 Furrow, Dwight 121, 123
Dreyfus, Hubert 113, 119–22
Dreyfus, Stuart 119–21 Gibson, J. J. 148
good (the good) 14–16, 21–6, 45–55,
ego 30, 32–4, 36–8, 40–1, 42n. 1, 133–4, 57, 60, 70, 75, 80–5, 89–92,
157, 200–4, 223 100, 105–8, 110–12, 118,
egoism (egoist) 33, 134, 142, 156 122–4, 130, 136–7, 141–2,
eidetic 97–8 145, 159, 176, 193, 195,
eidos 11 198, 212, 216–25
emotion(s) 13, 28n. 22, 52, 78–9, 82–4, goods of agency see agency
86, 89–90, 99–100, 103–4, 111, goodwill 60, 64, 70, 109
117, 132–4, 137, 150–1 Gurwitsch, Aron 3, 72
episodic emotion 103–4 Guthrie, W. K. C. 192
ends 13, 49, 81–2, 121, 139, 197
essence 19, 34–6, 38–40, 69, 126, 134, Habermas, Jürgen 162n. 11, 193
140, 199, 205 habit(s) 1, 13, 15–16, 22, 46, 52,
ethics 1–3, 5–6, 12–27, 29, 35, 37–8, 56–7, 82, 85–6, 90, 106, 119–20,
41, 45–6, 48–50, 57, 58n. 10, 79, 140–2, 146, 150, 171–5, 209,
87–8, 91, 97, 99–102, 112n. 1, 217–8
113–14, 116–20, 124–5, 127–32, happiness 2, 14–15, 20, 47, 53–7, 75, 81,
134, 147, 158, 191, 193, 196–7, 124, 137, 140–1, 155
202, 219 deep happiness 47, 55–7
phenomenological ethics 16, 79, Hegel, G. W. F. 139, 168, 174, 193
100–2, 127, 191, 193, 197 Heidegger, Martin 3, 30, 33, 45–57,
virtue ethics 1–3, 9, 37, 45–6, 57, 114–17, 124, 127–8, 136,
79, 87–8, 113–14, 117, 150, 165, 168, 180–9,
128–30, 147, 150, 191, 196, 191, 197–9, 223
202, 212–3, 219 Henry, Michel 29–42, 123
eudaimonia (eudaimonism) 6, 14–16, Hildebrand, Dietrich von 78–80,
35–6, 54–5, 81, 102, 108, 110–12, 88, 92–3, 98, 132–46
124, 126, 133, 137 Hooker, Brad 129
evaluation (valuation) 70–1, 82–3, 86, Hopkins, Burt 2
91, 100, 102–3, 105–7, 109, horizon (horizon intentionality) 30–1,
121, 219, 225 36–7, 61–9, 71, 73–7, 80,
evidence 61–4, 68, 71, 73–6, 78, 101–2, 127, 143, 196, 213, 215,
105–6, 109–10, 122, 158–60 219–21, 225
expertise (expert) 119–20, 148, 151–4, ecstatic horizon 30–3, 36, 38
157, 160–1, 181, 192, 212, 224–5 external horizon 65–7, 69
home horizon 213, 220–1, 225
flow experience 151–4, 158, 160 internal horizon 62–6, 69–72, 76
forgetfulness 32–6, 38–42, 220, 222 temporal horizon 65–7, 69, 76, 213
 Index 241

humility 6, 39, 138–9, 141, 143–6, 205 Life, hyper-power of 40–2

intellectual humility 110 Life, revelation of 30, 32, 34
Hursthouse, Rosalind 1, 52 logic (logical) 23–4, 46, 53, 98, 132,
Husserl, Edmund 1–3, 51, 61–7, 158, 194
97–8, 100, 106, 115–17, 191, logos 12, 18–21, 24–7, 31, 51,
195–7, 199–203, 212, 214, 80, 83
217, 219 Louden, Robert 128–9
love 37–9, 41–2, 60–1, 69, 75–7,
immanence 15, 30, 127, 202 80, 84, 90, 134–5, 137–40,
importance 47–8, 54, 57 142–5, 150–1, 155, 158,
impropriation 33–5, 38–9 185–6
intellectual charity 109–10 self love 60–1, 74–7
intellectual courage 110
intellectual generosity 109–10 MacIntyre, Alasdair 128
intellectual humility 110 Marcel, Gabriel 141
intentionality 4, 40, 61–77, 89–90, Mason, Elinor 129
97–101, 103–5, 120–1, 133–4, McDowell, John 121, 130
137, 200–2, 212–13 mean, the 17–19, 21, 25–6, 85, 126
see horizon mercy, acts of 39–41
emotive intentionality 90, 134 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 114–18, 120,
intentional feeling 134 129, 149, 177n. 7, 219
intersubjectivity 19, 72, 103, Miller, Dale 129
105, 112, 116, 121, moment, non-independent 97–8
166, 175, 222 Moore, G. E. 47
intuition (intuitionism) 21, 128, moral maturity 119–20
132, 134, 143 moral theory 79–81, 83–4, 87–9,
ipseity 29–35, 38–40, 42 92, 113, 158
Morris, Katherine 126
James, William 150, 159–60 mother(ing) 167–70, 178
justice 6, 50, 54, 111, 120, 126–7, Mulligan, Kevin 99, 104
145, 184
distributive justice 111 natural attitude 36, 42n. 1, 195, 212–5,
220, 225
Kant, Immanuel 114, 116–19, 125, 127, naturalism 10, 27, 107, 115–16, 123
133–4, 137, 140, 143, 158, 199, nature 9–17, 19, 22–4, 26–7, 35,
202, 208, 222 41, 55, 135, 139, 142, 155,
Kierkegaard, Søren 125 165–6, 169, 171, 173, 186, 188,
know–how 119, 122, 128 191–5, 203, 208–10, 216, 218,
Kosman, Leslie A. 79 220–3, 225
human nature 11, 23, 134, 195
Laing, Ronald David 168 Nietzsche, Friedrich 53–4, 58n. 6,
language 10, 13, 47, 72–3, 80, 101, 182–3, 185, 191, 197–9,
135, 160, 165, 174, 181, 203, 208
204, 216 nonindependent parts
Lebenswelt (lifeworld) 115–16, 142 (or moments) 97–8
Levinas, Emmanuel 58n. 10, 117, normative ethics (normative theory) 15,
121–2, 124 112, 114, 116, 123, 126
Life, as abosulte 30–42 normativity 14, 74, 97–101, 112, 118,
Life, forgetfulness of 32–5, 38, 43 122, 127–8, 219, 224
242 Index

of agency 5, 106–7, 165, 168, 170–1, 175 rationality 18–19, 80, 115, 117, 119–22
ontology 11, 29–37, 39, 42, 49, 54, realism 10, 12, 98–100, 103, 125,
56, 98, 100, 117, 123, 166, 188, 199–205
168, 180–3, 186–9 phenomenological realism 99, 103,
fundamental ontology 29–30, 32, 199–202, 204–5
35, 42, 56 reason 18–21, 23–7, 33–4, 69, 78–9,
open-mindedness 109 81–8, 90, 101–9, 111, 113,
orthos logos 18–21, 24–6 115–19, 123, 125, 128, 132,
Other, the 44n. 11, 112n. 1, 116, 172, 138, 195, 222
204, 206, 209, 215 practical reason 78–9, 82, 84–6,
88, 102, 111, 128
particularity 10, 17, 88, 120 recognition 69–72, 75, 91, 108–9,
Pascal, Blaise 132 166, 174
passivity 31, 34, 36, 39, 137, 175 respect 50, 75, 108–9, 185, 216,
perception 9–10, 13, 20, 23–5, 27, 62–6, 219–20, 225
78, 80–6, 90–3, 98, 104, 113, Rilke, Rainer Marie 136
121–2, 128, 132, 135, 141, Rinofner-Kreidl, Sonja 1
144, 147–51, 155–61, 177, role, social (role in life) 69, 72–6
196, 199, 219
performance 11, 15–16, 22, 39, 41, Sacks, Mark 118
52, 106, 219 Sartre, Jean-Paul 57, 115, 117–18, 124–8,
See action 191, 197, 199–208, 222
Peucker, Henning 1–2 Scheler, Max 78–80, 88–93, 98–9,
phenomenality 30–2, 37, 41 117, 132–46
phenomenological ethics 16, 79, 100–2, Schütz, Alfred 61, 68, 72–3
127, 191, 193, 197 self, the 11, 31–2, 37–42, 136, 151–2,
phenomenon (phenomena) 1, 9–10, 154–61, 173, 180–1, 214, 216,
18, 30, 47–8, 51, 61–4, 68, 223, 225
72–3, 80, 83, 87, 99, 121, 123, care for the self 155, 214,
134, 140, 159, 183, 186–7, 199, 216, 225
215, 221–2 self love 60–1, 74–7, 134
phronesis (phronēsis) 12, 18, 20–1, 23, self-regarding interests 155–7,
26–7, 113, 119, 124, 126, 148, 159–60
151, 154, 156–7, 161, 188 self-recession (recession of the
phronimos 147–8, 151–2, 155, self) 154–5, 157–60
157, 159 Simms, Eva-Maria 167
Plato 9–11, 15, 30, 45–6, 50, social role 69, 72–6
53–5, 57, 139, 180, Sokolowski, Robert 213, 223
182, 191–5 solipsism 44n. 10, 202
play 72–3, 119, 152–4, 157, 174–5, 216 Sophocles 194
pluralism 12, 107, 188–9 soul 11–13, 15–16, 18, 21–3, 37,
potentiality 11–15, 62–3, 65–9, 75, 41, 54, 83, 85–6, 136, 142,
183, 185–6, 193, 195 180, 192
practice 15, 18, 21–2, 46–7, 72, 81, 91,
140–1, 154, 167, 172–5, 214–5, Taylor, Charles 113, 116, 119,
217, 220–1 122–4, 128
see action telos 11, 13, 16, 25–6
preference 55, 78–9, 85, 88–93, 135, 137 the good see good
prohairesis 79, 83, 85–91 the self see self, the
 Index 243

time 11, 16, 21, 27, 35, 49, 55, 60–1, virtue(s) 1–2, 9, 12, 14–27, 30, 37, 39,
64–70, 73–6, 82, 103, 105–6, 41–2, 45–7, 50–4, 57, 60–1,
109, 118, 120, 127–30, 132, 64, 68, 71, 75, 78–81, 83, 85–8,
135, 141–3, 149, 151–2, 154, 90–1, 93, 97, 99, 101–2, 106,
157, 167, 182, 186–7, 191–2, 108–14, 116–31, 132, 135,
194, 196, 205, 207–8, 210, 138–55, 157–61, 166,
215–18, 221, 223–4 170–6, 180, 191, 193,
transcendence (transcendental) 10, 15, 195–8, 201–2, 209–10, 212–16,
31–2, 55, 107, 112, 115, 118, 219–20, 225
123, 125–7, 136, 138, 146, virtue ethics 1–3, 9, 37, 45–6, 57, 79,
200, 219 87–8, 113–14, 117, 128–30,
trust 61, 64, 70–1, 75–7, 170, 172, 175 147, 150, 191, 196, 202,
truth 12, 18, 20, 30, 32, 34, 37, 39, 41, 46, 212–13, 219
48–9, 68, 79, 83–4, 89, 98, 102, von Hildebrand, Dietrich see Hildebrand,
105–7, 110, 141, 143–4, 165, Dietrich von
180–1, 186–7, 198, 206 vulnerability 170, 173
typification 67–8, 72–3
will 2, 22, 49, 78, 90, 132–3, 140,
Uexküll, Jakob von 149 169–70, 176, 181, 188,
197, 208–9
value 14, 27, 52, 70, 75–6, 78–84, good will 60, 64, 70, 109
87–93, 98–100, 108–9, weakness of will 22
125, 132–46, 155, 171, 185, work 11–12, 15, 66–7, 80, 108, 145,
221, 225 173–5, 183, 186, 213, 225
valuation see evaluation work of art 144–5
Vessey, David 63–6
vice 16, 25, 78, 82, 85–6, 88, 93, 142, 144 Young, Julian 223
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