The Review of Metaphysics

Eve Rabinoff argues that there must be "ethical perception" implicit in the thought of Aristotle. All ethical action of the rational moral agent for Aristotle takes place among singular things, and for that agent to act among singulars, the agent must indeed know them. This agent, states Rabinoff, knows singulars through perception (aisthē sis) only. Therefore, some kind of perception is ethical. She raises objections to the existence of ethical perception. For example, Aristotle speaks of virtue—both rational and moral—as the habitual excellence of activity in humans from the rational principle. If moral or ethical virtue, as a height of ethical life, is only of the rational principle, and perception as such is of the nonrational, then the ethical seems to belong not to perception but to reason. Considering the relation between perception and reason, Rabinoff offers two ways by which one might address such an objection to the reality of ethical perception. The first is to conceive of the intellect as the per se seat of ethical life, with perception used only instrumentally by the mind in ethical action, but this would be ethical perception only incidentally (kata sumbebē kos). Rabinoff rejects this position and adopts her alternative: Some perception must be ethical as such (kath' hauta); she insists that anything truly ethical for Aristotle is essentially situated in singulars as known only by perception. Moreover, universal moral rules of intellect play no part in Aristotle's situational ethics according to Rabinoff; reason needs ethical perception for the ethical life. She builds her case as to how there can be ethical perception as such, and how it interacts with reason in the moral human agent. Chapter 1 is devoted to manifesting that, in the Aristotelian corpus, the perceptual part of the soul is an expansive and manifold power in itself. Of great importance is Rabinoff's not uncontroversial interpretation that all incidental sensibles [End Page 161] (De anima 418a20–24) are discerned properly by a basic power of perception—even substances, like Socrates or son-of-Darius, are so discerned, rather than being grasped properly by the intellect. Such a take on incidental sensibles, along with emphasis on phantasia and memory, opens the way to ethical discernment in perception as such. In chapter 2 one reads that human perception is specifically able to be altered qualitatively by reason's influence. Ethical perception falls within this human or noetic perception. Rabinoff points to the difficult passage of De anima 429b11–23, proposing that the intellect's informing of perception can make perception itself "nonperspectival"—that is, perceiving matters of ethical concern beyond a purely private perspective and beyond an individual's own pleasure and pain: beyond what only "appears good," to what is "truly good" ethically, and providing perception specifically for right ethical action. In chapter 3 she claims that being "impersonal" in apprehension is how the intellect is separate at De anima 430a22–23. Intellect can place this impersonal character on perception to achieve "non-perspectival perception" in itself. The objects of this perception are, to Rabinoff, the incidental sensibles. With reason's proper penetration of perception, exceeding mere perception, the human soul is unified in the working of its parts and thus is virtuous. Rabinoff confirms her interpretation through Aristotle's explanation of akrasia—an inconsistency, due to a kind of ignorance, between what a moral agent judges one ought morally to do and what one actually does. For Rabinoff, akrasia is due to a failure in attaining adequate integration of the intellectual and perceptual such that "perspectival" perception alone, or chiefly, determines the action of the moral agent; that 's, ethical perception is not attained in the individual soul. The power of perception can act without reason's influence which results in a nonethical or even unethical perception, and ultimately leads to faulty ethical character.

In chapter 4 Rabinoff brings ethical perception to bear on Aristotle's intellectual and ethical virtue of phronēsis (prudence or foresight). Phronēsis is ethical...