[lit-ideas] Kallokagathos, Psukhe kai Ethos

 
We are discussing the distinction between 'psychology' and  'ethics'. Walter 
O. makes it, J. M. Geary too. I claim that philosophical ethics  _is_ a branch 
of philosophical _psychology_. Some quotes to prove it, below. 
 
1986 C.  KELBLEY tr. P.  Ricoeur Fallible Man 111 
"The elementary passions were thus situated so 
as to favor the purificative and liberating enterprise of an  Aristotelian 
psychology of pleasure."
 
Walter O.:
 
>No psychological question (considering
>psychology to be an  empirical science) 
 
And why would you narrow the word like that. H. P. Grice was surely right  
when he stubbornly avoided the label, "philosophy of mind" for what it _really_ 
 
is: 'psychology'. Since in the pragmatist America that he had to endure the  
label 'psychology' meant the Wundtian
empirical thing, he _had_ to preface, boringly, his reflections as being  
'philosophical psychology':
 
      Grice, "Method in philosophical  psychology"
            in _The  conception of value_, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
 
I wouldn't like to just _oppose_ Geary's or Walter's view, but would like  to 
unstubbornly learn. Other examples will help. There are some quotes in the  
OED. One above, relates 'pleasure' which for some ethical theories is the base  
of _morality_ (Epicurean, and the Gardeners). Then there's one below about  
Russell connecting 'the psychology of adultery' as being 'refuted by  
conventional morals'. It's not clear what this rather pedantic philosopher may  
be 
wanting to say, and I know he married six times.
        Geary would possibly appeal to  _psychologia rationalis_ which was 
part of the 'great' go at Oxford for sometime  (when the thing was taught in 
Latin).
        I would thing a serious  consideration onto psychology would _show_ 
that 'ethos' (or 'moralia' as  Plutarch preferred) _is_ by definition a 
_branch_ or development of  'psychology'.
        For Grice the branching was  sub-ordinate. For Grice, psychology is 
about what you _want_ ('boulemaic').  Morals, for Grice is what you _want_ to 
want. (or, as Judith Baker puts it, on  how morality 'cashes out' in desire, or 
interest). No motives are pure and they  do not have to be pure. I have 
understood Grice to mean that there is a  regressus ad infinitum here. This is 
my 
rewrite -- alla Grice -- of Hare's  universalizability thesis. For R. M. Hare, 
"p" is moral if "p" is  universalizable (e.g. "Do not copulate anally", will 
not be universalizable for  Kant -- and Hare -- and it's thus immoral).
         For Grice, "p" is moral if  and only if, we cannot provide a 
justification for its negation in terms of an  infinitely iterated series of 
'boulemaic' operators.
        "Say the truth!" or better,  "Don't lie!" is moral in that 
         -- it is inconceivable --  except by the conscientious Nazi -- a 
situation
where one may want to want to want to want ... to want to lie. One may lie.  
One may want to lie. But would one want to be _wanted_ by someone to _lie_ to  
us, when we don't _want_ that? No, hence lying is not moral. Hence it is  
immoral.
          If, to use Geary's  example, Margaret cannot empathise with human 
loss and all she is concerned is  the Goldengrove. Do we want that for our 
daughter? If we want it, And we want to  want it, And we want to want to want 
it,  
and so ad infinitum And we  find no counter-evidence, then it is moral; if 
not, it's immoral.
          Aristotle was too  much into _dividing_ virtues, but as Grice 
notes, "virtue is ENTIRE". Since  'vice' is 'kakon' for the Greeks, "the ugly", 
the 
good must not just be  "agathon" (or agathos applied to a male, and agatha, 
applied to a female), but  "kallokagathos". We need the adj. 'kallos' to 
_contrast_ with the ugliness of  vice. I will not consider here the Spartan 
jejunity 
of the eromenos of Lysander  who was very ugly (and lame) -- i.e. hardly 
'kallos' -- but 'yet a nice boy'. I  will take that as problem-example, 
borderline 
case, and meant to put the  handsome (kallos) in their proper, modest place.
---- Note again that I want to _learn_, to comments welcome. I would use  
Russell's phrase 'conventional morality' as a silly pleonasm. If morality is  
ethos, and convention is an ethos, 'conventional morality', is 'ethical 
ethics',  
or 'moral morality' -- redundant. I don't think we want to rely on ethos too  
much, but rather on what Aristotle has as 'virtue', or as I prefer, what 
Plato  had as 'agathós' or "kallokagathós" -- These things, do they apply to 
the 
_soul_  alone or to the "male" or "female" in whole. I would think the latter. 
And they  _may_ to do with the interaction of the male/female with other 
male/females (but  cfr. Geary's example on one's exaggerated love for _pets_). 
There should be  restrictions on how to interpret these 'virtues' as to what 
type 
of  psychological state they refer, and what conditions we expect to occur to 
call a  male 'kallokaghatos" say. "Courage" (andreia) I take for granted. The 
fact that  the Greeks are talkatively too much about it can only implicate to 
_me_ that  they were a bunch of _cowards_. 
          Psychologia is a  post-classical Latin had psychologia (late 16th 
cent., orig. in German  sources), from the ancient Greek - PSYCHO- comb.  form 
+ post-classical Latin -logia  -LOGY comb.  form. Cf. French psychologie (1588 
in Middle French as  psichologie ‘science of the apparition of spirits’), 
Spanish  psicología (1760), Italian psicologia (1739), German  Psychologie 
(1741).
           Neither this word nor any other member of its family is paralleled 
in Greek. But  we do find that most philosophers who have treatisese on the 
soul also go on to  have treatises on ethics. 
              Post-classical Latin psychologia was first  used in Germany in 
the late 16th cent., app. by J. T. Freigius (in his  Quæstiones Physicæ (1579) 
It  has frequently been claimed (app. earliest by W. F.  VOLKMANN VON VOLKMAR 
 Lehrbuch der Psychologie (ed. 2, 1875 ) I. 38) that  psychologia was used 
earlier by Philipp Melanchthon (see MELANCHTHONIAN n. and adj.) in a lecture 
title, but this use has never  been traced.
       At the end of the 16th cent. the  post-classical Latin word gained 
wider currency through works of the German  philosophers Rudolf Goeckel 
(Goclenius) the Elder -- hoc est, de hominis  perfectione, animo, et in primis 
ortu 
hujus (1590, here in Greek  characters)) and his pupil Otto Casmann 
(Psychologia 
anthropologica, sive  animæ humanæ doctrina (1594)).  In 17th- and 18th-cent. 
philosophical  works, it freq. denotes a branch of study concerned with human 
souls; for  example,  J. M

ICRAELIUS Lexicon philosophicum (ed. 2, 1662 ), s.vv.  Metaphysica and 
Philosophia,  defines  psychologia as  

 a  subdiscipline of metaphysics [and I'd claim a generator for  'ethics']
 
The word is also frequent in 17th-cent. post-classical Latin  medical works; 
for example, S.  BLANKAART Lexicon  medicum (1679 ) (cf. quot. 1693 at sense 
1) distinguishes between  psychologia and somatotomia (or somatologia) as the 
two  parts of anthropologia.

All these instances the post-classical Latin word.  The 'empirical' sense is 
freq. attributed to the German philosopher and  mathematician Christian Wolff, 
specifically to his works 
           Psychologia empirica (1732) and 
           Psychologia rationalis (1734), 
the respective subtitles of these works suggest that Wolff  intended 
psychologia in a transitional sense. Such a transition is first  _suggested_ in 
English only as late as 1712.

For a discussion of the  early history of the word in Latin and various other 
European languages see  further F. M. Lapointe 1973, in Rivista critica di 
storia della filosofia  28 138-60.
]   
In an English context, 'psychology'  has more than once been referred to as 
the study or consideration of the soul or  spirit. Cf. PNEUMATOLOGY n. 1. Now  
rare (in later use chiefly in etymologizing  contexts).    N. CULPEPER tr.  S. 
Partlitz New Method of Physick 168 
        "Psychologie is the knowledg of the Soul [L. Scientia de  anima 
psukhologia dicitur]." 
1929 B. RUSSELL Marriage & Morals xvi. 182 
"The psychology of adultery has been falsified by conventional morals." 
1772 C. CRAWFORD (title) A dissertation on the Phædon of Plato..to which is 
annexed, a  psychology: or, an abstract investigation of the nature of the 
soul. 
 
Cheers,

JL
 



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