Aristotle on the Apparent Good

在从柏拉图到现在的哲学传统中，“表象善”的讨论是无处不在的，这一传统认为，只要东西对我们来说是好的，我们就会渴望它们。它在亚里士多德的作品中尤为突出。在他的心理学著作中，人类和动物所有食欲驱动的行为的目标都是表面上的美好。在伦理学著作中，它在解释人类的动机和道德错误方面发挥了重要作用：我们都在为我们认为是善的东西而奋斗，但只有在有道德的人看来，真正的善才是如此。事实上，正如我旨在证明的那样，表象善是亚里士多德关于欲望、动机、情感、深思熟虑、意志薄弱和对幸福的愿望的绝对核心概念--简言之，对于他的行动哲学和伦理理论来说都是如此。但是，什么东西看起来是善的呢？这样的表象和普通的感性表象有什么关系？为什么这样的表象往往是假的？为什么亚里士多德声称(许多人都会同意)，快乐看起来特别好？善良的外表是如何激发欲望和行动的？没有一项持续的学术研究解决过这些问题，甚至没有人承认它们值得一问。这无疑在一定程度上是因为，对许多哲学家来说，谈论表面上的好是松散的或比喻的：说某事在某人看来是好的，只是说她认为它好，或者说它的吸引力特别生动。我想证明亚里士多德的情况是不同的。亚里士多德认为，事物在我们看来是美好的，就像事物可能看起来小、圆或蓝一样，这得益于一种负责梦、记忆、想象和视觉错觉等准知觉现象的心理能力：想象力(幻影)。如果这是正确的，那么我们可以通过将亚里士多德对幻象及其在动机中的作用的描述--我们在心理学著作中找到的描述--应用于他的道德理论中所描绘的表观善的概念，从而更好地理解表象善的概念。我在书中的项目就是做到这一点。我认为，虽然在伦理学著作中没有明确的表观善理论，但这些作品假定了一种表观善的理论，我们可以从心理学著作中获得这种理论。善的表象是一种令人愉悦的、本质上激励人的准知觉表象，它是通过幻觉从先前的愉悦知觉中衍生出来的。其结果是对亚里士多德道德心理学的新解释，这一解释将在两个重要且相关的方面引起争议。首先，它赋予快乐在人类动机中的绝对核心作用，从而在人类美德中也是如此：不仅我们的情感和欲望，而且我们对价值的想法，甚至我们独特的理性欲望，都是基于善的外表，因此最终是基于愉悦的感知。其次，它极大地限制了理性的理性思维在亚里士多德伦理学中的作用：幻觉--非理性认知，即我们与低等动物分享的一种意识形式，属于人类灵魂的非理性部分--可以将特定的对象甚至一般的目标识别为善，这是亚里士多德的大多数阐释者认为只能由知识分子扮演的角色。我通过这本书的目的是通过这本书来表明，如果不关注这些观点与他的认知和欲望心理理论之间的联系，就不能完全理解亚里士多德的伦理观，就像在《论灵魂》和《论梦想》这样的作品中所详细描述的那样。我的目的也是为了表明亚里士多德在当代哲学辩论中做出了重要贡献，在一些核心领域，这一点尚未得到承认：例如，关于价值判断在激励行动中的作用，价值判断与欲望之间的关系，以及情感的性质。

Talk of the 'apparent good' is pervasive in a philosophical tradition which stretches from Plato to the present, a tradition which holds that we desire things insofar as they appear good to us. It is particularly prominent in the works of Aristotle. In his psychological works the apparent good surfaces as the goal of all appetite-driven actions, human and animal. In the ethical works it plays a major role in the explanations both of human motivation and of moral error: we all strive for what appears good to us, but only to the virtuous person does what is truly good appear so. In fact, as I aim to demonstrate, the apparent good is a notion absolutely central to Aristotle's accounts of desire, motivation, emotions, deliberation, weakness of will, and the wish for happiness - in short, both to his philosophy of action and to his ethical theory.But what is it for something to appear good? What is the relation between such appearances and ordinary perceptual appearances? How and why are such appearances often false? Why does pleasure in particular appear good, as Aristotle claims (and as many would agree)? And how do appearances of goodness motivate desire and action? No sustained scholarly investigation has addressed these questions, or even recognized them as worth asking. This is doubtless in part because for many philosophers, talk of the apparent good is loose or metaphorical: to say that something appears good to someone is simply to say that she thinks it good, or that its appeal is particularly vivid. I want to show that Aristotle's case is different. Aristotle holds that things appear good to us, just as things might appear small or round or blue, in virtue of a psychological faculty responsible for quasi-perceptual phenomena like dreams, memories, visualization and optical illusions: 'imagination' (phantasia). If this is correct, then we can reach a better understanding of the notion of apparent goodness by applying the account Aristotle gives of phantasia and its role in motivation - an account we find in the psychological works - to the notion of the apparent good as it figures in his moral theory. My project in the book is to do just that. I argue that while no theory of the apparent good is explicit in the ethical works, these works assume a theory of the apparent good which we can derive from the psychological works. An appearance of goodness is a pleasurable, essentially motivating quasi-perceptual appearance, derived through phantasia from previous pleasurable perceptions.The result is a new interpretation of Aristotle's moral psychology which will be controversial in two important, and related, ways. First, it gives an absolutely central role to pleasure in human motivation and thereby in human virtue: not only our emotions and appetites, but also our thoughts about value, and thereby even our distinctively rational desires, are based on appearances of goodness, and therefore ultimately on pleasurable perceptions. Second, it greatly restricts the role of rational, intellectual thought in Aristotle's ethics: phantasia - non-rational cognition, i.e. a form of awareness that we share with lower animals, and that belongs to a non-rational part of the human soul - can identify particular objects and even general goals as good, a role that most interpreters of Aristotle have thought can only be played by intellect.I aim through the book to show that Aristotle's ethical views cannot be fully understood without attention to the connections between those views and his psychological theories of cognition and desire, as detailed in works like On the Soul and On Dreams. I also aim to show that Aristotle has important contributions to make to contemporary philosophical debates in some central areas where this has not yet been recognized: e.g. on the role of value-judgments in motivatingactions, the relation between value-judgements and desire, and the nature of the emotions.