On Non-Moral Interpretation of Some Basic “Moral” Concepts of Nicomachean Ethics

Every concept has its own genealogy and history by which the arkhe of a conceptual field had been covered with sediments, so that very often the arkhe has ceased to be recognized. Precisely in this situation there is the conceptual framework of the Nicomachean Ethics, at the same time it is very difficult to call Aristotle the “intellectual stranger” for the contemporary philosophy. The complexity of the theoretical situation consists in our intellectual belief in the “moral” status of the Nicomachean Ethics, although there is a great gap between the ancient Greek “ethic” and our idea of morals. We very often unsophisticatedly prefer to stylize Aristotle as a “moral” thinker, forgetting to distinguish the fundamental constitutive grounds of the ancient Greek type of thinking and one that had arisen within the Christianity. The reason to consider this difference is the feeling and understanding of frontiers of the diverse types of intellectual thinking in the history of philosophy, distinctness of these types has been more commonly eroded within our reflection through the attainments of the simplified historicism.

Thus behind the ethical intuitions of the ancient Greek philosophy there are logical and ontological grounds, arkhai that generates the quite different seeing of the “world” and “human being”. So the term “arete” widespread in the Ancient thinking is traditionally rendered as “virtue”, the meaning of which is located in moral dimension, but “arete” refers to such phenomenality of the being [ontos] that is connected with the correspondence of the being with its own nature [physis]. So comprehended being exists within the “world” based on the principle of genesis, the “world” with special temporality where “now” [nun] is out of time, where there is difference between chronos, aeon, kairos. This is the temporality with special moods [Heidegger’s Befindlichkeit]: “without fear, hope and pity” (S.S. Averintsev). The topology of such a “world” is heterogeneous, hierarchic, multilayer, dynamical. That is why the concept of the human being is centred on “autarchy” and “autokratia”. And the whole philosophical thinking is penetrated with “logos” - the term that does not yield to no our conceptual translation. According to a first approximation, “logos” is the “melos” of the “world”, the polyphony of sounding of forces, and echo of it manifests in ”dynamics” of thinking catching the connection of logos and destiny so that meaningful difference of the self, of the world, of others transforming the chaotic into the “story” that gives meaningful figures [schema] of the life in explication of the ethics as “proficiency in the way of life” [ethos+techne].

It is absolutely clear that such a world is deprived of moral “shells” produced by the God as a “moral Creator” [I. Kant], or by the contemporary “moral norms”. This is the real context for interpretation the basic concepts of the Nicomachean Ethics.

It is intended to explicate the terms arete, eydaimonia, boule, to ey, and the thesis “ to logon ekhon ”.

[6] Igor Mamykin, Svetlana Mizyakina

Belarusian State Economic University, Minsk, Republic of Belarus