DUCS Talk Summary: Christopher Rowe, “Restoring a text, and an important disagreement between Aristotle and Socrates”

For the study of Classics, we often rely on medieval manuscripts, distant copies of original texts by ancient authors. However, not everyone is familiar with the meticulous work of restoring a text from the manuscript to its most likely original form. In his talk, Prof Rowe illustrated the process by presenting his own project. In fact, he is working on the first ever complete analysis of a manuscript of Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics that had been inaccessible to scholars until it came up for auction at Sotheby’s in the 1970s. He went on to discuss a divergence between Aristotelian and Socratic attitudes towards moral knowledge which emerged from the new analysis of the text of this Aristotelian work.

He started his talk by showing the stemma of manuscripts containing the Eudemian Ethics (as produced by Harlfinger: see below). This is relevant because for the restoration of a text it is necessary not only to ‘collate’ a manuscript, but more importantly to compare it with others to find discrepancies between them and finally create a most likely reconstruction of the original text. In particular, he mentioned the three already collated primary manuscripts (i.e., the ones that are not copies of others we have): ‘P’, the oldest, in the Vatican Library, ‘C’, in the Cambridge University Library, ‘L’, in the Laurentian Library in Florence, and finally ‘B’, the ‘new’ manuscript, which had been in the library of Sir Thomas Phillips, Bt. (1792–1872), until it was sold in 1976 to the Bavarian State Library in Munich (= Monachensis 635). Prof Rowe believes that it is a copy of a predecessor of α (see stemma, below), and, since it contains elements which are absent in P and C (‘twins’, i.e., copies made by the same copyist from the same original) and it predates L, it can be considered another primary manuscript. It should be noticed that Aristotle wrote sixteen hundred years before the oldest manuscript of the Eudemian Ethics that we have. Restoring a text, in Prof Rowe’s words, is literally trying to put back together a text which is in bad condition into a better condition. In his opinion, a philosophical text has an advantage: it has to be a cohesive and coherent whole with a well-defined structure, so it is not as difficult to restore as, for example, a (non-philosophical!) poem which is liable to be much less predictable in content.

A significant text for the restoration of one small part of the Eudemian Ethics is the Liber de Bona Fortuna, a medieval Latin translation from a Greek version older than the ones we currently have. It only covers two chapters. It was originally translated by William of Moerbeke, and was picked up by Aquinas. The work analyses specifically the role of god in human action, which was a central topic in medieval philosophy, and Aristotle’s importance to, and authority within, the Church was such that his ideas on any topic were likely to carry special weight (more than 140 copies of the little book from the 13th and 14th centuries are extant). Within the text, Prof Rowe identified a peculiar passage on good fortune, which he reads as a possible response by Aristotle to Plato’s Socrates on moral knowledge.

In Socrates’ straightforward view, acting morally is a matter of knowledge: if a person knows what it is best to do, they will act in that way. There always is a right answer. What ought to be called good fortune is actually just knowledge, which is the only unconditional good.

By contrast, Aristotle identifies a difference between scientific or technical knowledge and ethical knowledge, which he calls a special kind of γνῶσις, and is much more difficult to pin down. In the relevant chapter of the Eudemian Ethics (VIII.2), he distinguishes two kinds of good fortune: chance, which does not happen regularly, and that of the so called “εὐτυχεῖς”, people he calls ‘fortunate’ because they act impeccably, but they do so without having to think about it (we might call these people just ordinary good sorts); Aristotle denies that chance is involved, since their good fortune is constant.

There is a sentence which is crucial for our understanding on this matter, because it can be read in two ways, depending on whether we read the word τύχη (tyche) given us there by the manuscripts as the nominative singular of the noun for ‘chance’, or as the third person singular of the aorist subjunctive of τυγχάνω (‘happen [to be]’/’actually is’): the latter would require an iota subscript, but these manuscripts typically omit these iotas. The first reading would give us “chance is the cause of [these people’s] good fortune”, whereas the second would give “the desire is actually cause”. Given that the chapter actually rules out the first option, Prof. Rowe suggested that the second reading must be the correct one. Good fortune is not due to chance but to the agent’s desire being right. But how does that come about? The Eudemian Ethics goes on to argue that just as god moves everything in the universe, so he/it does, somehow, in the soul: that is, the cause is the divine (element) in us (here too the meaning only emerges fully with the help of a certain amount of judicious textual restoration). It is thanks to this that the people in question live their good and successful lives. We all of us have this divine something in us, but it operates in a special way fin the “εὐτυχεῖς”, who do the right thing not as the product of calculation or deliberation, but thanks to their desiring the right thing at the right time thanks to a kind of “divination”. (In fully deliberating agents, the divine element is probably responsible for the “divination” of general principles.)

In conclusion, it is evident that the restoration of a text is crucial for our understanding of an author. Of course, there are difficulties such as the great gap of time between the author’s life and the written records which we possess. However, Prof Rowe is confident that it is possible to restore a text with some certainty thanks to the clues present in the texts as a whole: there are parts that are not corrupted and can help us to understand the more obscure passages. The more manuscripts of the same text that survive, the more likely it is that we will be able to reconstruct the text in its original form. It is fascinating how even a single word can change the meaning of a sentence, sometimes ending up altering a whole philosophical idea. It nicely highlights just how fragile our certainties and arguments on ancient authors can be.

Elena Limongelli
With suggested edits by Professor Rowe

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