What Is Virtue? | Jennifer Frey

The ancient conception of virtue is quite far removed from our own. Nowadays, we tend to think of virtue as a kind of moral righteousness, as opposed to sin. The Greeks, however, had a very different idea about virtue, or arete, as they called it. For Aristotle, virtue was a unique form of excellence, something that each person or animal or thing could aspire to. On this episode of “What Is X?” Justin E.H. Smith invites on philosophy professor Jennifer Frey to try to recover this idea of virtue and to ask whether Aristotle's definition can still work for us today. Along the way, they revisit the works of Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Anscombe and Alasdair MacIntyre, and talk about everything from Madame Bovary to sea cucumbers. They ask: Does virtue ethics fit into the purview of moral philosophy, or should it stand alone? Is living a good life a matter of luck or effort? Is there one particular path to human flourishing? How should philosophy orient itself toward literature? And what is the best Coen Brothers movie?

Transcript

Justin E.H. Smith  00:16
Hello, and welcome to “What Is X?” I'm your regular host, Justin E. H. Smith. As regular listeners will know, on each episode, we ask a question of the form, “What is x?”—where x, the variable, is filled in by some well known, difficult idea or concept, one that's often of interest to philosophy. And today we're going to be talking about a very central x in the history of moral philosophy, namely, virtue. What is virtue? And I'm going to be talking about this with a guest who's thought about virtue a great deal. I'm here today with Professor Jennifer Frey of the University of South Carolina in Columbia, I think. Jennifer is a well known specialist of medieval and early modern philosophy, the history of ethics, and philosophy of action, and she takes as her guiding lights figures such as the three A's: Aristotle, Aquinas and Anscombe. And I think Augustine is also in there somewhere…? And anyhow, I'm delighted to talk to Jennifer Frey today. Hi, Jennifer.

Jennifer Frey  01:48
Hey, I'm delighted to be here.

Justin E.H. Smith  01:50
Oh, I meant to say—and I'll say this once again, before we get to the end—Jennifer Frey is also a pioneering and prominent philosophy podcaster. You can find her podcast, “Sacred and Profane Love,” all over the internet, and in particular, under its Twitter handle, which is @eudaimoniapod. So I hope the listeners will go to your podcast once they've finished this one. But today, you and I are going to figure out what virtue is. Alright?

Jennifer Frey  02:30
Yeah, fantastic.

Justin E.H. Smith  02:32
Okay, so let me state at the outset, kind of the limits of my knowledge of this topic. I love Aristotle, I read Aristotle all the time, I seldom think about Aristotle through the retroactive lens, or retrospective lens of the Aristotelian tradition—of figures like Aquinas, not to mention Anscombe. And when I think about virtue for Aristotle, I think about the Greek notion of arete, which might just as easily be translated as excellence. And its meaning as excellence is one that applies not just to human beings, right, but also to trees, and birds, and planets, and moss, and so on. Everything has its own excellence. And to this extent, I've always seen Aristotle's notion of virtue as very far from our own, in that it seems almost, you could say, naturalistic, as continuous between human beings and everything else that's out there. And so I have trouble understanding how you can get much mileage for it, or out of it, if you're trying to think in particular about human virtue.

Jennifer Frey  04:15
Well, I mean, obviously, I think you can get a lot of mileage out of it. But look, it is true that Aristotle's worldview, Aristotle's understanding of moral philosophy is incredibly alien to us, if we're really reading it with fresh eyes. And, and of course, many people are not reading it with fresh eyes. I mean, you know, growing up in the philosophy nursery, especially at Pittsburgh, where I got my Ph.D., you know, people talked about—all the time, people talked about Hegel and Kant and Aristotle as if they were basically doing the same thing. And I find that more than a little bit absurd.

Justin E.H. Smith  04:59
Sure, yeah.

Jennifer Frey  04:59
So I was—I was kind of very much on the outs of Pittsburgh in thinking this. Because, I mean, for one thing, Kant is very much working with the idea of morality that I think is simply not there in Aristotle. And another huge and non-negligible difference is that for Kant, the natural world is devoid of purpose and value. And for Aristotle, the natural world is suffused with purpose and value. And human purpose and value is just part of a much broader natural world. I mean...

Justin E.H. Smith  05:43
Right.

Jennifer Frey  05:44
And, and so there is no real separation and Aristotle between, you know, rational nature, and other things. Now, human beings, Aristotle is quick to emphasize—right?—in Book One of the Nicomachean Ethics, which is his major ethical treatise, that what is distinctive about the human being is that it has rational capacities. But, for example, when he gives his famous function argument, where he first defines virtue in relation to human excellence, human flourishing, you know, he uses examples, like, the excellence of knives. You know, I mean, he's just thinking—I mean, he has this basic idea that the excellence of the thing is what allows it to perform its characteristic activity well, so the excellence of a knife is that it's sharp, right? Because the characteristic activity of a knife is to cut things, and a dull knife will not do that well. Right? And so it even applies—the concept of our arete even applies outside of the natural world. It's a very basic and flexible concept for Aristotle, which he puts, I think, to rather brilliant use in thinking about not so much moral philosophy. I mean, I really hesitate to describe Aristotle as a moral philosopher because, again, I don't think he has the concept of morality. What interests Aristotle is living well, doing well, and what he calls, you know, eupraxia or eudaimonia. Right? Doing well, or the living of flourishing or blessed life. Right? And he thinks that, in particular when he's talking about eudaimonia, he thinks he's talking about something almost divine, there's something almost godlike about living a eudaimon life. Right? There are all of these interesting moments all over the Nicomachean Ethics, where, you know, he's quick to say, you know, saying that someone is, like living a eudaimon life, it's not even necessarily to praise them. Like, he's like, you know, we praise the just man, because we know that justice is good. But he's like, you know, the eudaimon life, that we give encomia for—like, that is sort of something much higher. And he also admits that there is this element of fortune, too. And he's very clear about that. And I think that is a huge break, again, with our modern conception of morality. You know, whether or not your moral or you have a good will for Kant cannot be a matter of luck or happenstance.

Justin E.H. Smith  08:46
Right, right. Yeah, Jonathan Haidt, the current author, talks about winning the cortical lottery, right? Like you're born with a cortex that facilitates your happiness. Right? And in some sense, that's a return to this idea that your ability to thrive or to live in accordance with eudaimonia is, to some extent, just the luck of the draw.

Jennifer Frey  09:22
I mean, to an extent, right, I mean, so for Aristotle, he thinks that virtues, which are the excellences of thought, action and feeling that a human person needs to cultivate in order to even have a chance of living well—you know, he thinks that these have to be deliberately chosen. So you acquire them over time, and that's a very intentional thing. And he thinks that they are praiseworthy. So he thinks that they're necessary. It's just that he doesn't think that they're sufficient. Right? So he thinks that you also have to be blessed, right, with external goods. So he says things like—which again, you know, if you're a Kantian, ought to horrify you—he says things like, “Well, if you're just extremely ugly, then you know, you can't have it.” So like, maybe if you're just kind of ugly, it's extremely ugly, you can't have a eudaimon life. If you're not born into like, the right kind of family, the right kind of society. You know, you're just not—it's not going to happen for you. And then also, and this I find incredibly interesting. He thinks that, you know, tragedy is possible. And his constant example there is King prime. So he's like, look, you know, you could also be a good person, and be well-born and have these advantages. And also, it all goes to hell, for reasons that are basically outside of your control.

Justin E.H. Smith  10:56
Right, right. Right, right. And there's no hint of the stoic admonition to not get hooked on externals in the first place. Right?

Jennifer Frey  11:07
Right, no, he…

Justin E.H. Smith  11:07
The externals are part of what constitutes happiness.

Jennifer Frey  11:14
Yeah. And I think that's, that's kind of consonant with this idea that it's all part of this broader structure, right? So if you think about like, in the natural world, you know, the example that I always use for my students is: you can think of an oak tree. And it's amazing to consider that these 400-year-old oaks on our campus that are so enormous and majestic and old, were once these tiny acorns that you're constantly being pelted with. And, you know, you have in that acorn, like, the potential to become a flourishing oak. But, of course, it doesn't do that on its own, it has to be in the right circumstances, it has to have the right kind of characteristic environments, in order for it to really flourished. And I think Aristotle recognizes something similar in human life, right? That you can take all this human potential. But if you put it in the wrong kind of society or something like that, it's just not—you know, there, there are other factors in play.

Justin E.H. Smith  12:24
Indeed, in Aristotle, there's a pretty monolithic conception of the path by which one can come to be happy. Right? Just as with a knife, there's only one thing that the knife properly does. And if you try to use the knife as a doorstop, or something like that, you're misusing the knife. Similarly, human beings have one particular path to flourishing as human beings, right? And it's written into what it is to be a human being. Do you think that's fair to say? With some maybe some minor, minor room to maneuver?

Jennifer Frey  13:16
Yeah, I mean, I think it's not wrong, but it's potentially misleading. So it's not wrong, because Aristotle thinks there is an architectonic end to human life and that we all want it. But he also recognizes that we all kind of disagree about how to get it and what it really is, you know, some people think it's just pleasure—like the common, the vulgar people, just think that it's pleasure. Some people think, you know, that it's the active life, so he—which he associates with honor. I mean, he canvasses a bunch of options here. It's true to say that he thinks that there is something that is the highest human activity. And this is contemplation. And he thinks that it really in its highest form, it's contemplation of the highest object, which is God. And the most godlike thing you can do is to contemplate God, because that's literally what Aristotle's god does. It's thought  thinking itself. And so it's true that he thinks, you know, he has a very specific vision of like, what the highest thing you could do is. But I also think that he has an awareness—you know, I mean, he's reflecting primarily on the works of his teacher, Plato. I think he recognizes that (1) we can't always be contemplating—we've got to do stuff. And that some people aren't as well suited to contemplation as others, and that's fine, so long as we construct the right sort of city and which there is a leisured class, for whom contemplation is, you know, both possible and kind of the animating principle. And, you know, so I think he, I think he—he recognizes that there are kind of many different ways that human beings might flourish. But what will remain the same between all of them is that they will be lives that reflect, you know, the exercise of virtue, and they will also be lives that are lived within a polis, a political structure, that has laws that are ordered to bringing about and maintaining the common good, which is to say, ordered to bringing about and maintaining virtue in its citizens.

Justin E.H. Smith  16:00
That does sound like—that does sound like an excellent summary of the picture we get from the Nicomachean Ethics in particular. It sounds like it might be a little bit in tension with some of the other pieces of the puzzle of Aristotle's philosophical project—thinking, in particular of this passage in On the Parts of Animals where Aristotle says, like, he's basically trying to justify the work of studying sea cucumbers, and so on. And he says, “Look, it would be better to study the celestial bodies, because they're more divine because all they do is move in a perfect circle and think about God all the time. But the celestial bodies are farther away. And sea cucumbers are really close and easy to access. And yes, they're lowly, but just like everything, they contain a certain amount of divinity.” And that's where he quotes Heraclitus: “Here too dwell gods.” And that seems to reinforce the idea that human excellence, the ultimate human excellence, achieved in contemplating the divine is not just analogous to the excellence of a sea cucumber egg becoming an adult sea cucumber, it's actually the same thing, but just, you know, in a different manner, given what's possible for the different kinds of being, right? So it's across the board, isn't it? Um…

Jennifer Frey  16:02
Yeah, mmhm.…

Justin E.H. Smith  16:45
But… Yeah, and I think, sorry, I mean— No, go ahead.

Jennifer Frey  17:21
One thing that I'm interested in, and that I've been thinking about a lot lately is, you know, the role of contemplation in the cultivation of virtue, and just in the good life generally. And one of the reasons that I've been thinking about that so much is that if you hang around at all with analytic philosophers, who either think and write a lot about Aristotle, or in particular think and write a lot about his ethics, or just people who call themselves neo-Aristotelians, they're just—they just kind of throw up their hands when it comes to Aristotle and contemplation. And they're like, “Yeah, I don't get why he saw that that was so important. Obviously, the active life and justice are the most important things.” And one, I think that if you can't see why this mattered so much to Aristotle, somehow fundamentally, you're just not getting it.

Justin E.H. Smith  18:55
Right. Right. Right. Yeah.

Jennifer Frey  18:57
Especially his relation to Plato, but too, I think that it is very revealing of a contemporary prejudice against contemplation.

Justin E.H. Smith  19:06
Yeah.

Jennifer Frey  19:06
In favor of action. And, you know, I'm coming down more and more on the side of contemplation. Not as opposed to action, but as necessary for acting well, and so I've been trying to think more about ways that Aristotle allows for everyday contemplation of the kind that you find, for example, so wonderfully articulated in the writings of Iris Murdoch.

Justin E.H. Smith  19:36
Uh huh, right.

Jennifer Frey  19:36
Where you might just look at a bird and, like, that could be good for the soul.

Justin E.H. Smith  19:41
Yeah.

Jennifer Frey  19:42
Um, and so I appreciate you bringing up that passage. Because I think in a way it speaks to this sort of thing.

Justin E.H. Smith  19:49
Sure, sure, sure. No, it's clear that Aristotle was trying to transmit some of his wonder standing knee-deep in the tide pool. And you know when elsewhere he says, wonder is a form of—how does he put it?—Wonder is the seed of philosophy? And wonder is what drives mythology. So myth is in the service of philosophy. Wonder, I think is clearly something that's central to at least Aristotle's natural scientific writings. And it's really interesting, the idea that you suggest following Iris Murdoch, that that sort of wonder could be, could count as what he means by contemplation.

Jennifer Frey  20:48
Right. And I think, you know, I think one of the most beautiful and moving parts of Aristotle's corpus is actually the first book of the Metaphysics. It's just this—because what becomes clear in the first book of the Metaphysics is that the highest good is the perfection of the, you know, it's sort of the full potential of this very natural basic desire that we have, right? Aristotle opens the Metaphysics by saying, “All men by nature, desire to know and the evidence of this is the delight we take in our senses.”

Justin E.H. Smith  21:24
Right, right right. Delight…

Jennifer Frey  21:25
And then he launches into this discourse about wonder, and this desire to know—this drive that we have to know and to understand. And, yeah, I mean, that's key to his ethics. And I think from a contemporary perspective, we have a very hard time understanding that. But I think it's really actually kind of the key. Because, of course, for Aristotle, virtue is an expression of rational knowledge. And he makes this distinction, right, between intellectual virtue and ethical virtue. And, you know, and he also has this distinction between sophia and phronesis—so, kind of theoretical reason, or theoretical wisdom, and practical wisdom, and these are, these are good habits of mind, stable disposition of good thinking. And that is very different from moral virtue, which is stable dispositions of appetite and feeling, right. And he also was very clear that, at least on the practical side, right, you cannot be practically wise, you cannot make good decisions that hit the rational mean and the circumstances, which is what practical wisdom is supposed to do unless you have well-ordered passions and appetites, especially bodily appetites, because passions and appetites cloud the judgment. Right, right. Right. Which is also why I think he says only old people can truly be wise. Right? Yeah, well, so two reasons why he says that. One is he thinks that you can really only come to know the mean through experience, like this is not a priori knowledge. And it couldn't be. And then second, he thinks that young people just haven't yet fully mastered themselves in the relevant sense. And so he recognizes that just reading some lectures about virtue isn't going to make you virtuous. It's just not.

Justin E.H. Smith  23:44
Right, right, right. That seems obvious enough. So you seem to be convinced that we read Aristotle's ethics today, through a lens—through a distorting lens that was put up by Kant, and maybe other figures in the modern period, that not only distorts what Aristotle's saying, but also projects back into antiquity, an idea of moral philosophy as meditation on duties towards others, that simply wasn't there. In antiquity, Aristotle—someone like Aristotle—understands the project of ethics explicitly as the project of leading the best kind of life, living your best life.

Jennifer Frey  24:46
Yeah, I think absolutely. And, you know, I mean, just to give a few examples, one of the most influential books in analytic philosophy on Aristotle's ethics doesn't even talk about friendship. Aristotle talks about friendship more than he talks about anything else in the Ethics, he has two entire books. Now, that is definitely reading Aristotle through the lens of modernity, where friendship has nothing to do with morality. Right?

Justin E.H. Smith  25:17
Yeah.

Jennifer Frey  25:18
And it really has almost everything to do with virtue for Aristotle. So the fact that—it literally, in this book, which is like almost 400 pages, it comes up in one footnote. And that is astonishing. But it's also very telling.

Justin E.H. Smith  25:36
Yeah…

Jennifer Frey  25:36
But you know, it's also I mean, you can find all these Aristotle's scholars, you know, trying to say that Aristotle is really a Humean about practical reason, not understanding that for Aristotle—or somehow not seeing that, for Aristotle, there is not this dualism of practical reasons. So there's not this dualism between prudential reasoning and moral reasoning. There is no difference for Aristotle, there is no—so, I mean, one way to think about Aristotle, is that for Aristotle, when you think about good practical thinking, and when you think about virtue, you're just as likely to be thinking about wit and friendliness as you are about justice, or temperance.

Justin E.H. Smith  26:24
Right, right.

Jennifer Frey  26:25
Like, you know, whether or not like you're witty at a dinner party matters for Aristotle. And, you know, and I think, from a contemporary from—from the perspective of thinking about morality, that just seems nonsensical. And I think, actually, it's very hard to see Aristotle, kind of, like, for who he is. It's very natural to read these ancient texts through our own categories, our own—you know, the categories that we've been given. And that's why when I teach Aristotle, I don't do any secondary literature. I'm just like, we're reading this book. And we're gonna try to see what this book is saying.

Justin E.H. Smith  27:17
Right, right, right.

Jennifer Frey  27:17
And it's actually much easier to teach someone pretty much ignorant of moral philosophy.

Justin E.H. Smith  27:26
Yeah, right.

Jennifer Frey  27:27
Because they're not, they're not already thinking in a certain way.

Justin E.H. Smith  27:31
Right, right. Well, let's try to zoom ahead, even if we're, so to speak, living in, you know, the fallen age of philosophical ethics, and try to understand the current lay of the land, and then maybe, finally, also try to understand what virtue actually is. Now, there's a current—I mean, not everyone listening here has studied philosophy. There's a current of philosophical ethics in academic philosophy, called “virtue theory.” And this seems to draw on certain elements of Aristotle, and yet to be more of a kind of contender for, you know, the prevailing theory alongside others, like utilitarianism, and Kantian deontology and so on. What is the project of virtue theory? And what is the—what are its prospects?

Jennifer Frey  28:43
Okay, that's a—that's a great question. So, I think that the best example of someone who thinks of virtue ethics as modern moral theory is Rosalind Hursthouse. So she had a book in 1999, called Virtue Ethics, published by Oxford, in which she sort of announces, like, “Hey, virtue ethics is all grown up now. And we can play with the big boys.” And, you know, “We are just as capable of doing moral philosophy as all these consequentialists and deontologists. And the idea is to show that these thoughts from Aristotle in this tradition can be kind of shoehorned into this mold.” And there's a really wonderful series of papers actually sort of critiquing this idea that this is what we should be doing, you know, that we should we should want to stand up and say, you know, we're part of—we're part of the club. That rather what we should be saying is, we're not only not part of the club, but we would like to bring the clubhouse down. We think—this is not a group that we want to join. So you might make a distinction, which I think originally David Solomon made called “routine virtue ethics” and “radical virtue ethics.” And the radical virtue ethicists are people like Alasdair MacIntyre and Elizabeth Anscombe. Right, who are really asking to make a complete break with modern moral philosophy with contemporary modes of thinking about moral theory and asking to do something else. They're basically saying it's bankrupt, or it's senseless, it's an embarrassment, please stop. And then there's the more routine project where you say, “Oh, no, no, we can do this too.” And I'm very much on the radical—I'm very much in the radical camp. And although, you know, I have many routine friends, and I love them very much. But I just think that they have the wrong approach, in part because I don't think that—you know, I'm incredibly influenced by Anscombe's famous paper on modern moral philosophy, a paper that I think is, like a lot of Anscombe wildly influential but very little understood. Right? So you know, I think she really was—I think she meant what she said when she said, we should cease and desist from doing moral philosophy, that it's kind of bankrupt. And we should go back to Aristotle. And what she says is, we should figure out, kind of like, the moral psychology of this, there's something more fundamental that we need to figure out before we could even possibly do ethics in a way that was respectable and serious. And I am very much in agreement with that. So anyway, if we think about the difference between the radical and the routine people, if you look in the routine camp, there's actually like a proliferation of possible views. There are Humeans. And there are—even despite the fact that the kind of virtue ethics revolution was brought about by this paper that was arguing against consequentialism, there are virtue consequentialists. There are people who call themselves neo-Aristotelian. But neo-Aristotelianism takes many forms. So for example, there's a huge difference between—sometimes I call this difference, the difference between first-nature and second-nature naturalism. Somebody like Philippa Foot is very much a first-nature naturalist. So she's like, “Hey, actually, teleology is awesome. And virtue should be understood in this broader teleological framework.” And so she talks a lot about virtue being a natural good. And then you have someone like a John McDowell. And John McDowell is thinking, No, it's all second nature all the way down. It's all Bildung and there's nothing outside of that that could possibly matter. And so that's actually like a deep disagreement within the broadly Aristotelian umbrella and it reflects two very different readings of Aristotle. You know, I mean, McDowell's Aristotle is not my Aristotle, for example.

Justin E.H. Smith  33:23
Right, say a bit more about this radicalism and what it would mean, if you guys won…

Jennifer Frey  33:32
[Laughs] We are not winning…

Justin E.H. Smith  33:35
What would what would moral philosophy look like at that point?

Jennifer Frey  33:41
Yeah, I mean, I think that radical virtue ethics. And here you'll find a kind of ragtag group of people. But what sort of unites them? I think what unites them is this commitment to thinking that modern moral theory has a set of assumptions—all of which are bad. Right? So, for example, that there's a fundamental dualism within practical reason. So that we, we can reason according to like, what's prudential or what's instrumentally good, and then we can reason morally, and like morality is this super special, shiny part of the practical life, but there's much more to the practical life than morality and we're interested in this morality thing. Also, what you find in modern moral philosophy is a prioritizing of an idea of right action. And so you have the right as the central thing, and then, you know, maybe goodness is somewhere else in there. And I think for the radical virtue ethicist, we think that the good is prior—the prior concept—and that it's also a very big flexible concept. Right? And so I think one thing that I haven't mentioned yet about the Aristotelian tradition, but that I think is one of the most salutary aspects of it is the fact that you have a kind of analogical form of reasoning, where you see that, you know, the good is set in many ways, but there's something—there's some kind of focal meaning to the good that we can see in all these various instances. And I think that's a much better focus. But I also think that the radical camp wants to obliterate the distinction between moral philosophy and political philosophy—as reflective of not fully articulated, you know, political beliefs, right? I mean, like, trying to be an Aristotelian within the context of liberalism is a little bit tricky, actually.

Justin E.H. Smith  36:13
Right, but this—okay, yeah.

Jennifer Frey  36:14
So actually, so like, reorienting—so recovering, for example, the common good. Which, if you read neo-Aristotelianism, unless you're reading Catholics, you'll never find it, and yet, it's like central to Aristotle.

Justin E.H. Smith  36:32
Right, right, right.

Jennifer Frey  36:33
And, you know, he's not after the good of the individual as something distinct from the common good. He thinks that, really, we only understand the good of the individual in relation to the common good. And this becomes especially clear, and the kind of more ignored aspects of the Nicomachean Ethics, right, which is Book Five, and the two books on friendship. There is a very noticeable tendency for neo-Aristotelians to kind of just skip those, as if they don't, you know—they're not really relevant.

Justin E.H. Smith  37:14
Right, right. You know, I'm having a huge light bulb going off over my head, I don't know if you can see it, as I'm finally understanding some of the some of the background information that motivates some of the ideas I've seen circulating in Catholic intellectual circles about the unity between the social good and the individual good. Right?

Jennifer Frey  37:47
Yeah.

Justin E.H. Smith  37:47
And that that's the basis of the critique of liberal democracy, right, which I find—I'm somewhat apprehensive about, even if I'm ready to acknowledge that there's a danger that liberalism is in fact, just an incoherent and unsuccessfully neutral framework, in which we're each allowed to cultivate our own conception of the good, even if its incoherent, and even if it's not what it thinks it is, I'm still inclined to think it's a pretty good thing to keep around. Because we’ll continue to have opposing views of what the social good is. And therefore, given those opposing views, we should all just maybe think about our own individual good. And I see how imperfect it is. And for now, I'm just kind of happy to understand how these pieces fit together. And what the link to Aristotle is. Am I getting it right?

Jennifer Frey  38:57
Yeah, I mean, I just would add that, you know, postliberalism is also said in many ways, and that there are a wide variety of positions to take within that conceptual space. Some of them are pretty extreme, and from where I'm standing unpalatable. And then you know, other other ones, I think, are much more sensible. But I think, you know, I just think it's great that people are actually, you know, just having these conversations and pressing liberals to rethink some of their core commitments about, you know, the nature of liberty, the nature of the good. I mean, this is like really basic, fundamental stuff. I share your worry. It's sort of like how I felt as an undergrad about Marx. And I was like, oh, yeah, it's obvious that capitalism is terrible, but I might be more scared of what replaces it. Looking around, you know, historically, at what kind of came about, it doesn't really look better. So, so yeah, I mean, I think that just—I don't know, that resonates with me, that's fine. But I think there are many ways to think about how our current understanding of political liberalism could reimagine itself to take on a more robust conception of the common good. And so, you know, I just think there's a lot of work there to do.

Justin E.H. Smith  40:30
Right, right. Right. Right. Right, certainly, or at least to face up to this strange kind of feeling of incompleteness that the liberal structure itself provides, right, rather than insisting that it's a full package.

Jennifer Frey  41:06
That's right. Yeah. And it's also bound up with like a whole bunch of other kind of reassessing, for example, the reassessment of the nation-state that is kind of going on right now. And so, I mean, just one form of postliberalism is sort of contemporary MacIntyre's kind of distributivist—this was kind of this radical localism, which is anti-capitalist, but not communist, or socialist. But something else. So yeah, I just think there are lots of options there.

Justin E.H. Smith  41:41
Mm. Now, virtue sounds—I'm just trying to shift gears a little bit so that we can maybe start to narrow down a stab at a definition of the term. It's something that has taken on highly moralistic connotation in Nietzsche's sense, right? As the opposite of, I would say, something like naughtiness, right. And it's curious, it's paradoxical, that virtue and vice became exactly what Aristotle would have insisted they're not—right?—like just terms for school marms, or for, you know, the kind of disciplinarian who would rap your knuckles to level at you when you've been doing what you shouldn't. So the fact that that happened makes me think that virtue has a strange and weaving history to it, right? But…

Jennifer Frey  42:59
Yeah, I mean, it does. And I think, you know, one of the things about Nietzsche is that he's, you know, he's critiquing this kind of Victorian nonsense, you know, that he sees around him. And I think sometimes we forget that. And, you know, the Victorian ideals are not ideals that I would like to defend, in any way. I don't have nostalgia for the Victorian age. So, you know, but I do agree that virtue talk is both alien, and alienating, but I'm not really sure—I don't really know what to do about that. I mean, there's this problem that you have when you're trying to recover something. And this is, in part actually, my interest in literature, one of my interests in literature is, you know, one problem that we have, generally, but philosophers have, particularly, is: the concepts that we often want to work with, like happiness and virtue have become like shopworn and almost like degraded, shopworn and almost meaningless. And so how do you how do you deal with that? And I struggled with that for a long time. And then I realized, well, actually, you know, the novelist and the poet are really the ones that can help us recover the true value of these concepts. By kind of maybe giving us new vocabularies, but also just showing us. You know, I just think that literature can show you things that theory never possibly could. And so I mean, that's, that's kind of like a large part of my own engagement with art is trying to recover lost things or maybe trying to clear away the dust. So that we can see these things again, the way that the way that we ought to see them, but it's a huge problem. I mean, if I knew how to solve that, I don't know… Your own— ...I would have solved it.

Justin E.H. Smith  45:33
Your own podcast, “Sacred and Profane Love” deals primarily with literature, if not exclusively.

Jennifer Frey  45:39
Yeah.

Justin E.H. Smith  45:39
Do you—do you use novels when you're teaching moral philosophy as well?

Jennifer Frey  45:45
Well, not regularly. So I have a philosophy and literature class that I take—or sorry that I teach. But unfortunately, I am sometimes met with quite robust resistance from my philosophy majors when I tell them, like, we're gonna read Flaubert. And they're like, "I'm a philosopher. I don't know how to read novels." And I'm like, "But isn't that part of the problem?"

Justin E.H. Smith  46:14
Yeah.

Jennifer Frey  46:14
You know, so I—it's hard to you know, it's, like, hard to force students to do something that they don't want to do. And so if I, if I do do it in an unannounced way—so for example, I did this upper-level seminar on evil and suffering. And I snuck in some literature I also snuck in some film, like we watched the Coen Brothers A Serious Man, and we read Milton's Paradise Lost. But then we also did all this philosophy. Oh, I also made them read the Book of Job.

Justin E.H. Smith  46:53
Right, because A Serious Man is inspired by the Book of Job.

Jennifer Frey  46:56
Oh, it's totally. Yeah, it makes no sense without the Book of Job. Um, it's also like one of my favorite Coen Brothers films.

Justin E.H. Smith  47:04
It’s wonderful.

Jennifer Frey  47:04
Yeah, it's so great. It's a hidden gem. But yeah, so I'll kind of like, kind of throw it in there, alongside some philosophy, that way, you know, they're not forced to write on Milton, if it really is just too much for them, or they hate it, or whatever. But if—but when I do Literature and Philosophy, it's like, a literature class. And then we read philosophy alongside it. It's very much like the podcast.

Justin E.H. Smith  47:32
Yeah, this is kind of getting off on a different topic. But I think it deserves at least a few minutes from us because I share your view that literature has something really important to offer, perhaps more important than theory, when we're thinking about the cultivation of the moral character and other other deep problems. I've often balked, however, when literature is presented to philosophers or within the context of the study of philosophy as, like, a great source for mining philosophical problems, right?

Jennifer Frey  48:22
Yes, I—you should. Yeah.

Justin E.H. Smith  48:24
Yeah, in some cases, it's clear like, yeah, The Grand Inquisitor is, inter alia, of philosophical text. But often when you're reading literature, and you're finding that it's deepening your sense of the moral in an unexpected way, it's not because it's resolving a quandary you had so much as making you see the world in a profoundly destabilized way, or something like that.

Jennifer Frey  48:54
Yeah, no—so I totally agree with this.

Justin E.H. Smith  48:59
That makes, that makes me think, like, it's, it's not philosophy, but it's better than philosophy. Perhaps I shouldn't put it like that.

Jennifer Frey  49:09
No, I think it's fine. One of the things that just kind of like happened to me as I as I got older, is that the limits of philosophy became increasingly clear to me. And I'm not sure that that would have been the case if I weren't doing moral philosophy in particular. But yeah, I mean, there are, you know, philosophy is absolutely fantastic. And it makes me incredibly happy and I've devoted my life to it and I wouldn't change—I would never go back and make another choice. But I think that philosophy is limited, in part because theory is limited. And, you know, if you actually go back and look at the ancients, if you look at Aristotle, he is drawing on literary sources, as you know—as it figures and as, you know, sources of insight, but it is a mistake to reduce the role of literature as like, I don't know, giving us a theme or giving us a moral. You know, if you—like if you just want to know, you know that fantasy is bad, then you could just learn that fantasy is bad. Like, you don't need to read Madame Bovary. And it would be ridiculous to say, the reason you should read Madame Bovary is because it will show you the fantasy is bad. Like, the reason you should read Madame Bovary is because, honestly, it should have this kind of enduring impact on you. Right? It is the thing to go back and keep contemplating, in the particular. And I think that philosophers have this tendency—and it's not just philosophers, but philosophers have this tendency to approach literature and just just get to the theme, like, what's the point? What's the moral? And that is, of course, precisely to miss the point. And whenever I see philosophers do this kind of crowdsourcing thing, where they're like, "Oh, can somebody give me an example from literature where somebody…" and I'm just like, "Ugh, stop!" Like, no, don't do that. That's not… Or there's also—I just wrote, like, this manifesto about this. I'm not joking. There's this thought, which is actually very common, that the way to think about fiction is that it's a kind of thought experiment. So the best way that philosophers could think about fiction is to treat them like thought experiments, maybe thought experiments in the practical life. And I don't like this view, I think that it is reductive, and that it totally misses that it's art. And art isn't a thought experiment, whatever art is, it's not that. And so yeah, anyway, this is something I could go off about. So I'll just stop.

Justin E.H. Smith  52:31
No, no, it's—I think it's important, because it seems like this is of a pair with the conceit in contemporary philosophy that you can specify what virtue is as, say, a set of rules, right? Similarly, it's a misunderstanding of literature to say that you can understand it by, you know, making a bullet-pointed list of what its lessons are, you know: don't have affairs or something like that, if it's Madame Bovary.

Jennifer Frey  53:09
[Laughs] Yeah, yeah.

Justin E.H. Smith  53:12
And so it's another example of the ways in which contemporary philosophy has engaged in this process of self-narrowing or etiolation to the point where it really can't engage with the kind of questions it would like to answer. Right?

Jennifer Frey  53:36
Right. Yeah. I mean, I think, yeah, and I think one of the problems with modern moral theory is that it has a very hard time with the complexity of human life and the complexity of human psychology. And, you know, I mean, I think you could sort of see that without literature, but it's impossible not to see it with literature. And I think that I really admire philosophers like Bernard Williams, who, despite the fact that I disagree with so many of his conclusions, and I definitely disagree with his starting points in so many examples, but in some sense, he really gets it. You know, he gets the complexity there. And he sees so clearly the problems with modern moral theory. And so I think in a sense, he deserves to be in the radical camp too. Although he can't for a variety of reasons that I think are all terrible. He cannot accept eudaimonism, in part, I think because maybe he—well, anyway, it doesn't… that's a different podcast.

Justin E.H. Smith  54:49
Well, no, you know, so far, I've been really impressed with the way we've managed to indict contemporary moral theories, without naming names, right?

Jennifer Frey  55:00
Yeah, I know. I don't want to name names.

Justin E.H. Smith  55:01
It's wonderful to do that to not kind of slip into denunciations of people. But, yeah, we can continue that on another episode of another podcast. But maybe we should start to try to wrap up here. I mean, I'm still thinking about virtue. And, you know, one of the things that often happens on this podcast is that, you know, we end up each episode, remarking, some variation of the old line from Aristotle, x is "said in many ways," right? And virtue is definitely said in many ways, like love is said in many ways, but virtue's many ways—I guess the whole question about these many ways virtue is said is whether they would necessarily be like different dictionary entries, you know, how you have the one, the two, the three in the dictionary to signal different meanings of a word, or rather, whether it's being said in many ways is the same thing being applied appropriately to different kinds of things.

Jennifer Frey  56:24
Yeah, I mean, I think I think it's more analogical, which means that there is a unity there. You know, but it's a it's a unity that allows for differences. So it's a unity, but not a sameness. And I think, like, if we're just thinking about virtue, or arete, we really are thinking of an excellent quality that allows the thing to perform its characteristic activity. Well, I think that's a good definition. Now, I think when we talk about virtue in the practical life, we are talking about a deliberately chosen state, right, that reflects a mean defined by reason in relation to us, as the practically wise person would define it. That is Aristotle's definition in Book Two. And I would defend that definition. Even the doctrine of the mean, which people poopoo, but I think I feel like I've just been on this earth long enough to see that it is simply a fact that the human mind swings to extremes—it actually seems really hard for us to find the kind of via media between excess and deficiency. So I sort of just read that—I mean, he kind of puts it in these mathematical terms, for whatever reason, but I just sort of see it as this incredible insight into human psychology. Which seems to have remained relatively stable over time and across cultures.

Justin E.H. Smith  58:03
Yeah, I guess we didn't even talk about the golden mean, and parallel wings of vices. I mean, I've always had a problem with that, in particular, in that I've confessed many times in public to having trouble with moderation, to being an extreme person. And, you know, for example, to having excessive appetites, and to have learned over my many years, that the best way to deal with some of these excessive appetites is not to learn to moderate them, but to stop them all together. Right? And so I don't think I'm particularly unique as a human being in being someone who says that, you know, to all those people who say, "Just come on, just have one drink," I say, "No, I want zero drinks," even though I recognize that one drink is the moderate amount. So the doctrine of the golden mean can lead I think, in culture, broadly speaking—can lead to this kind of cult of the moderate, that's actually harder to belong to, and that can cause some people more pain and difficulty than just keeping on being extreme in their own idiosyncratic way.

Jennifer Frey  59:27
Yeah. Okay, good. Yeah. Well, you should reject a cult of the moderate, that sounds dreary and boring. And I don't think that that's how you should understand the mean.  So remember that the mean is in relation to us. And if you look at the passages, mostly in Book Two and Book Three, where he is kind of like going over the mean in somewhat boring detail. It's clear that he thinks that the mean is determined in relation to the individual. So when thing that Aristotle recognizes, is that, you know, the right amount of drink for one person isn't the right amount of drink for another person. And in cases where—I mean, some people have a really addictive personalities, and for those people, you know, a kind of abstinence might make sense. I mean, Aristotle thinks that abstinence isn't recommended in a general way, because he thinks you should—I mean, Aristotle thinks that your appetites are good, and you should enjoy them. He does not have any horror at bodily pleasure. But he just thinks that bodily pleasures need to be regulated otherwise—I mean, obviously, it would just be a disaster. And he thinks that with respect to temperance, in particular, which regulate our appetites for food, drink, and sex, that the mean of health is part of what does that. But what is healthy for—I think he gives the example of a wrestler Milo—but what is a healthy amount for him to eat is not the same as for me, and it also depends on your like, what do you do? What is your role in society? What are your duties and your obligations? And so I think all of this is, in a sense, relative. You know, the thing about the mean is that it's incredibly flexible. But he's just thinking that for every person in every situation, there is a midpoint between access and deficiency, and what goes into the—and he thinks that it's a rational determination what the midpoint is, but you kind of have to bring your whole life to practical judgment. You know, it's not—and so, and the thing is, because these are all habits, right, they're not super reflective. Like, if you're at a party, you don't have to sit down and think, like, in this really complicated way. Like if you're practically wise, you just know what works for you, you know how many drinks is too much, you know, when you're going across the line and become kind of a boor—in the sense of boorish. Or, you know, like, and so he doesn't think he really think, it's not like you have to do this—

Justin E.H. Smith  1:02:35
Boorish—wait, I'm trying to remember. Boorish is one of the vices where clever-wittedness is the virtue, but I forget the opposite vice.

Jennifer Frey  1:02:48
So it's like, yeah, so wit is a mean between being boorish—which is sort of like, just being over the top and like, you know, you go to the party, and you're just the guy telling all the dirty jokes, like, you're a boor. But then the button the other extreme is you're just, like, totally dour and not funny. I forget the Greek word. But, you know, you're sort of like sitting there with pursed lips, and nobody—I mean, you're just no fun at all.

Justin E.H. Smith  1:03:23
Man, it's tough. It's high—high demands Aristotle puts on us.

Jennifer Frey  1:03:28
[Laughs] He has really high standards. But anyway, I mean, one thing that we haven't talked about is the way—sort of, like how medievals picked up Aristotle. So it's interesting to contrast Aristotle's definition of virtue with Saint Augustine's definition and the De Libero Arbitrio, which, you know, somebody like Aquinas, his real genius is that he is trying to synthesize these and make them compatible because on their face, they don't seem compatible. So Augustine defines virtue as a good quality of the mind by which we live righteously, of which no one can make bad use, which God works in us, without us.

Justin E.H. Smith  1:04:18
Without us…

Jennifer Frey  1:04:20
Right. So famously, Saint Augustine rejects pagan virtue, natural virtue. And he also seems—I've just pub in "seems" because I'm not an Augustine scholar, and I'm sure there's an Augustine scholar somewhere that will find some passage where he doesn't say this—but he seems to reject the idea that Aristotle and Aquinas embrace, which is that there can be good habits of our not-essentially-rational capacities. Right? So those would be our passions, and our lower appetites. These are capacities that can listen and participate in reason, but also can just not. And so temperance and fortitude are virtues that regulate lower appetites, the appetite for fear and, like, the appetite for sex. Augustine seems to want to put all the virtues in the will or the intellect. And so these are big differences, right?

Justin E.H. Smith  1:05:23
Huge, yeah.

Jennifer Frey  1:05:23
God gives us virtue and only in our rational capacities,

Justin E.H. Smith  1:05:27
And I suppose he wouldn't recognize that knives, for example, have the virtue of cutting.

Jennifer Frey  1:05:35
You know what? I don't know, if he—not in the De Libero Arbitrio, I don't think he does. But what's interesting to me is that Aquinas comes along, and he's got to reconcile these two. Right? Because they're both, in some sense, huge authorities for him. You know, Augustine, the less problematic authority, if he had just gone with Augustine, everyone would have clap-clapped. But he also really loved Aristotle, which got him into a lot of trouble. But he basically makes a distinction between natural virtue and theological virtue, or the cardinal virtues and the theological virtues. And so he says, Faith, Hope and Love, right, God works in us without us. They're infused. But the cardinal virtues, we can get those not on our own, but, you know, in the natural Aristotelian way through good teaching, and habituation and so on, and so forth. So Aquinas, in a sense, is doing something very new. And I actually think—I mean, I should just be honest, I think that Aquinas is an improvement on Aristotle in many ways, and I'm very interested in scholastic Aristotelianism, because Aquinas is much more sensitive to human—the human need for self-destruction, and self-deception. And, I mean, I just, I just think Aquinas, for a variety of reasons, is much more in touch with human fallenness. And so I think his theory is responding to that in a variety of ways, and also his moral psychology is much more robust and, I think, faithful to the actual messiness of human life than Aristotle's is. I mean, he sort of takes Aristotelianism, and he does things with it that are really surprising and unexpected. And, yeah, just more, more real, I think. Right?

Justin E.H. Smith  1:07:49
Right. I like the way you describe the challenge he's faced with of reconciling such wildly incompatible systems. I haven't thought about that so much with respect to the moral philosophy, but more with respect to metaphysics and cosmology, and so on. Right? How do you reconcile the Aristotelian conception of the unmoved and also extremely indifferent mover with a loving creator, right. And that's just an example of something that has just absolutely astounded me that it would have made sense in the thirteenth century, to attempt such a fusion. But here we are.

Jennifer Frey  1:08:40
Aquinas is a genius.

Justin E.H. Smith  1:08:44
So listen, I feel like all I can say is, I feel like agreement and disagreement and aporia really aren't to the point here today, in this particular episode, even though that's what we're always aiming for. I just feel like I kind of learned a lot from you, and a few light bulbs went off over my head, and I understand things better now. I'm happy, I think, with you to think about virtue in the sense that we've described it across humans and knives and sea cucumbers in an analogical way, as you say, Aristotle does and if we think of it like that, then I think also with you that the Aristotelian definition of virtue is a pretty good one. Right? So I guess we're in agreement. [Bell tolls]

Jennifer Frey  1:09:49
Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. I mean, I think you know, what would be great is if people were just interested, you know, in reading Aristotle and reading the De Libero Arbitrio, which is a small, small little text. Reading Aquinas, which is, I'm not gonna lie, it's not small. But well worth it. I mean, I would just be happy if people were talking about it again, in an informed way. Because I think a lot of contemporary discourse about virtue really doesn't reflect the tradition that that concept came out of.

Justin E.H. Smith  1:10:24
Right, right. But we're still dealing with the kind of the husks of that tradition, the kind of dead husks that were left when we abandoned the living tradition, people are still kind of exchanging these in the form of vocabulary and concepts, concepts we've inherited, but that have lost their earlier life. Right?

Jennifer Frey  1:10:50
That's right. Yeah. Go back to the seeds.

Justin E.H. Smith  1:10:54
Yeah, yeah. Well, it's important work that you are doing. And I, myself, am not only shamefully ignorant of Thomas Aquinas, which is, you know, really a lacuna for me, because the period that interests me most, the early modern period, and in particular, Leibniz, everything revolves around the question of how much should we retain from the Scholastic tradition? And how much should we reject? So for a conciliatory thinker, like Leibniz, unlike a radical like Descartes, it's all about kind of weighing how much you can still get out of these people today—that is to say, circa 1670—in a way that, you know, often is remarkably generous and its interpretation of them. But I am ashamed to say I more or less take my early modern figures' word for it, on the medievals, and you know, I hope to remedy that. So I'm thrilled to learn a bit more about it from you. Alright, well, listen, I again, I think technically we're in agreement, even though that seems a bit beside the point, given the the free flowing nature of our conversation, and either way, I had a great time. Once again, I've been talking to the philosopher, Jennifer Frey, philosopher and podcaster, who has her own podcast called “Sacred and Profane Love.” Look it up on the internet. Thank you very much for talking to me, Jennifer.

Jennifer Frey  1:12:45
Oh, thank you. It was really fun.