Nussbaum (1981) Saving Aristotle's appearances

Nussbaum, Martha C. (1981). Saving Aristotle's appearances. In M. Nussbaum & M. Schofield, Language and Logos: Studies in Ancient Greek Philosophy Presented to G. E. L. Owen. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 267--94.

At the beginning of Book vn of the Nicomachean Ethics, just before his discussion of akrasia, Aristotle pauses to make some observa tions about his philosophical method:

Here, as in all other cases, we must set down the appearances (phainom ena) and, first working through the puzzles (diaporesantes), in this way go on to show, if possible, the truth of all the beliefs we hold (ta endoxa) about these experiences; and, if this is not possible, the truth of the greatest number and the most authoritative. For if the difficulties are resolved and the beliefs (endoxa) are left in place, we will have done enough showing (1145b! ff).

Aristotle tells us that his method, 'here as in all other cases',1 is to set down what he calls phainomena, and what we shall translate as 'the appearances'. Proper philosophical method is committed to and limited by these. If we work through the difficulties with which the phainomena confront us and leave the greatest number and the most basic intact, we will have gone as far as philosophy can, or should, go

Aristotle was, as we shall see, well aware of such questions. In fact, he seems to have chosen the term 'appearances' deliberately, so as to confront them. By using this term for his philosophical 'paradigms', he announces that he is taking a position about philosophical method and philosophical limits that is very unusual in his tradition. 'Appearances' standardly occurs, in pre Aristotelian Greek epistemology, as one arm of a polarity, on the other side of which is 'the real' or 'the true'. The appearances - by which Plato and his predecessors usually mean the world as perceived, demarcated, interpreted by human beings and their beliefs - are taken to be insufficient 'witnesses' of truth. Philo sophy begins when we acknowledge the possibility that the way we pre-philosophically see the world might be radically in error. There is a true nature out there that 'loves to hide itself (Heraclitus, B123) beneath our human ways of speaking and believing. Revealing, uncovering, getting behind, getting beyond - these are early Greek philosophy's guiding images for the philosophical endea vour. The Greek word for truth itself means, etymologically, 'what is revealed', 'what is brought out from concealment'.5 Parmenides, the boldest of the philosophers whom Aristotle will be charging with violation of basic appearances, tells us unequivocally that truth is to be found only in a place 'far from the beaten path of human beings', after you depart from 'all the cities'.6 He puts the contrast between the true and appearances this way:

You will learn the unshakeable heart of well-rounded Truth. You will, on the other hand, also learn the opinions of mortals, in which there is no true confidence.

The opinions of finite and limited beings provide no good evidence at all for the truth; far less do they provide truth with its 'witnesses' and 'paradigms'.

When Aristotle declares that his aim, in science and metaphysics as well as in ethics, is to save the appearances and their truth, he is not, then, saying something cosy and acceptable. Viewed against the background of Eleatic and Platonic philosophising, these remarks have, instead, a defiant look. Aristotle is promising to do his philosophical work in a place from which Plato and Parme nides had spent their careers contriving an exit. He insists that he will find his truth inside what we say, see, and believe, rather than 'far from the beaten path of human beings' or (in Plato's words) 'out there'. When he writes that the person who orders these appearances and shows their truth has done 'enough showing', he is replying to the view expressed in Republic vi by insisting that it is not laziness, but good philosophy, that makes one operate within these limits. I want to arrive at a deeper and more precise account of Aristotle's method and of his reply to these opponents of anthropocentricity. Three questions (or groups of questions) will be important:

(1) What are Aristotle's phainomena? How is the term 'phaino ena' best translated? How are phainomena related to observation? to language?

(2) What, more exactly, is the philosophical method de scribed? How does the philosopher gather and set down the appearances, and what does he do with them then? For what reasons might he throw out some of them, and what has been accomplished when he has done that?

(3) Why should we, or our philosophers, be committed to appearances? Where do they get their claim to truth? What can Aristotle say to an opponent who claims that some of our deepest and most widely shared beliefs are wrong?

Instead of the sharp Baconian distinction between perception-data and communal belief, we find in Aris totle, as in his predecessors, a loose and inclusive notion of 'experience', or the way(s) a human observer sees or 'takes' the world, using his cognitive faculties (all of which Aristotle calls 'kritika\ 'concerned with making distinctions'11).

This, I suggest, is the meaning of Aristotle's talk of phainomena. It is a loose notion, one that invites (and receives) further subdivisions; but it is neither ambiguous nor vacuous. If we do not insist on introducing an anachronistic scientific conception, the alleged two senses and two methods can be one. When Aristotle sits on the shore of Lesbos taking notes on shellfish, he will be doing something that is not, if we look at it from his point of view, so far removed from his activity when he records what we say about akrasia. He will be describing the world as it appears to, as it is experienced by, observers who are members of our kind.12 Certainly there are important differences between these two activities; but there is also an important link, and it is legitimate for him to stress it. We distinguish sharply between 'science' and 'the humanities'. Aristotle would be reminding us of the humanness of good science. Owen correctly emphas ises that Aristotle is composing these methodological remarks in the shadow of Parmenides, who repudiated together, with out distinction, both the evidence of sense-perception and the data of shared language and belief; all this he derides as mere 'convention' or 'habit'. Aristotle, answering him, promises to work within and to defend a method that is thoroughly committed to the data of human experience and accepts these as its limits.