How To Sophia

 

The review of a new, abridged version of Nichomachean Ethics (and as much effort as it took to correctly type that out with one finger on my phone, I won’t be typing it again tonight) in The New Yorker discusses what Aristotle was about there in vague and annoyingly anachronistic terms. It is largely memoir of studying the Ethics (see?) at Oxford, with more insight into how Oxford teaches Aristotle than much else. The anachronism is in the conclusion of the review, which discusses the conclusion of the Ethics.

Notoriously, the Nicomachean Ethics ends with a sort of plot twist. Until this point, Aristotle has spent most of his time on a patient explanation of the virtues of character, with only a brief digression to tell us about the virtues of the intellect. But the last few chapters contain a genuine surprise—if you have not been reading closely. The highest of the virtues, he announces, is not (as most of his original audience would have taken him so far to be saying) “good judgment” but, rather, one he labels with that beautiful Greek word sophia. 

“Wisdom” is the usual translation, but Aristotle’s discussion of it makes it clear that he is using the word in what Meyer calls “a restricted technical sense.” Her rendering is “scientific learning.” Being sophos, Aristotle says, is “not only knowing what follows from the principles of a science but also apprehending the truth of the principles themselves.” Yet, if sophia is indeed a higher virtue than phronesis, mustn’t a life devoted to the exercise of “scientific learning” be a higher, a more flourishing, existence than one devoted to the exercise of “good judgment” in the practical spheres of living (running a household, ruling a city)? It surely would have surprised the aristocrats in Aristotle’s original audience to be told that their ambitions to be rich, well regarded, and powerful fell short of the highest flourishing of which human beings are capable.

The problem with this talk of translation is that the Greek term for science is better translated as “knowledge.” “Science” today means a specific field of endeavor, and sometimes a way of understanding. It’s not what the concept meant to Aristotle, which makes it arguable if Sophia is being used by him in that technical sense. In fact, I suspect the bias (at least) of the Anglo-American school in that translation, v. a more sympathetic Continental school approach to wisdom as an aspect of Being. In brief, one branch of western philosophy is inclined to put science above wisdom (if not replace the latter with the former entirely), while the other is more interested in maintaining the continuity of the concept back to the Greeks, where Sophia is wisdom (even showing up in the Septuagint as the wisdom of God).

So label me skeptical. Arguably Aristotle had a more technical use of Sophia in mind; but that doesn’t mean he meant scientia should replace it. Aristotle knew his own language better than that.

But the reason I mention all this is the cartoon in the same issue. It’s a sequence of images of the same person cranking the handle on a Jack-in-the-box marked with a question mark on the top. The sequence shows the young boy aging as the box remains closed. Finally, in old age, complete with wrinkles and whispy hair, the box opens, revealing a grinning skull on the spring, the now old man finally dead.

There was more Sophia in the cartoon.