Second Nature, Phronēsis, and Ethical Outlooks

ABSTRACT

The expression ‘second nature’ can be used in two different ways. The first allows phronēsis (practical wisdom) to count as the sort of thing a second nature is. The second speaks of second natures as distinct ethical outlooks. I argue that a failure to distinguish these ways of speaking of ‘second nature’ is philosophically significant, in that we are thereby prevented from seeing that phronēsis stands on a different logical footing from ethical outlooks. Recognising their distinctness allows the important question of the relation between them to be posed. Phronēsis, I argue, should be understood as the unity of the ethical virtues. It remains invariant as ethical outlooks vary. Seeing this allows us to pose the important question, otherwise obscured, how phronēsis is mediated through specific cultural contexts. I end with a concrete example of radical ethical upheaval to illustrate phronēsis as operative across ethical outlooks.

KEYWORDS:

• Second nature
• phronesis
• unity of the virtues
• aristotle
• john mcdowell

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for help with this paper to Alexander Douglas, Alec Hinshelwood, James Laing, Irina Schumski, Maximilian Tegtmeyer, Martijn Wallage, and the members of the Humboldt Conversations in Philosophy colloquium at the University of Leipzig where I presented an earlier version.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See (Wittgenstein 1953), §127. Cf. (McDowell 1996, 95), where McDowell tells us that the ‘ism’ he advocates (at this point in the text given the label ‘naturalized platonism’, but earlier dubbed ‘naturalism of second nature’) ‘is not a label for a bit of constructive philosophy. The phrase serves only as shorthand for a “reminder”, an attempt to recall our thinking from running in grooves that make it look as if we need constructive philosophy.’ See also (McDowell 2009c, 186), where he speaks explicitly of ‘[his] reminder about second nature’. It may be noted that neither in Aristotle nor in McDowell can a substantive philosophical ‘theory’ of second nature be found or an employment of a technical philosophical notion of ‘second nature’.

2. The latter issue is well explored in (Bridges 2007).

3. I have spelled out the grammatical complexities involved further in (Schuringa 2018).

4. Broadie (1991, 91).

5. McDowell indicates that it is specifically Burnyeat’s treatment of Book 2 of Nicomachean Ethics that he is following (McDowell 1996, 84 n). The phrase ‘second nature’ turns up in the translation Burnyeat provides of a key passage for his argument, NE 1147a21–22: ‘Those who have learned a subject for the first time connect together the propositions in an orderly way, but do not yet know them; for the propositions need to become second nature to them [δεῖ γὰρ συμφυῆναι], and that takes time.’ (Burnyeat 1980, 74).

6. See also the following similar formulation: ‘possession of the that, the propensity to admire and delight in actions as noble, is second nature to those who have been properly habituated’ (McDowell 2009a, 39).

7. Variants on this formulation occur in a number of places in McDowell’s texts. Cf. the following two passages in ‘Two Sorts of Naturalism’. ‘We can let the question arise whether the space of reasons really is laid out as it seems to be from the viewpoint of a particular shaping of practical logos’ (McDowell 1998a, 189). ‘What it is for the practical intellect to be as it ought to be, and so equipped to get things right in its proper sphere, is a matter of its having a certain determinate non-formal shape. The practical intellect’s coming to be as it ought to be is the acquisition of a second nature … ’ (McDowell 1998a, 184–5).

8. I here avoid the complex question of how to understand the expression ‘first nature’. Nothing becomes first nature to me; and it is of doubtful intelligibility to say that something is first nature to me. Perhaps I have a first nature, as well as a second nature. If so, my first nature might be conceived of as just a certain parcel of the realm of nature (perhaps the nature of which bald naturalists speak). A full reckoning of McDowell’s engagement with Foot in (McDowell 1998a) (and in particular, getting straight how ‘first nature’ figures in the parable of the rational wolves in §3 of that paper), and of Thompson’s engagement with McDowell in Thompson (2013), would exceed the scope of any single paper.

9. A formulation of McDowell’s in Mind and World has tended to encourage this impression. There McDowell wrote that human beings ‘are born mere animals, and they are transformed into thinkers and intentional agents in the course of coming to maturity’ (McDowell 1996, 125). For a repudiation of this formulation see McDowell (2011).

10. See Burnyeat (1980). For McDowell’s endorsement of Burnyeat’s reading, see esp. McDowell (1998c); see also (McDowell 1996, 84 n); (McDowell 2009a, 34).

11. Burnyeat makes reference to the Meno passage, but does not note the way in which Aristotle makes a central feature of his account a fusion of all three of Meno’s supposedly mutually exclusive options.

12. A further feature of Burnyeat’s reading with which McDowell’s reading of Aristotle on moral education resonates is the emphasis on the integration of the desiderative with the rational. In the properly morally educated subject, the desiderative propensity to do the good and the rational motivation to do so are not only aligned but fused in such a way as to be inseparable.

13. In considering how to construe McDowell’s talk of ‘shaping’, the previous footnote is relevant. It would not make sense for McDowell’s motivation in speaking of ‘shaping’ to be that it is merely the appetitive part of the soul that gets shaped (as might be suggested by his talk of ‘a certain determinate non-formal shape’ (McDowell 1998a, 185)), given that it is rational and appetitive soul that get shaped together. Instead I propose that the way to make sense of the talk of determinate non-formal shaping is that the soul gets to manifest a set of (at once desiderative and rational) propensities that are not imposed by an external rule (and are in that sense non-formal, by contrast with the Kantian ‘formal’ conception of practical rationality that McDowell combats in 1998a).

14. McDowell speaks, for example, of something’s being ‘an intelligible candidate for being the way second nature should be’ (McDowell 1998a, 190). (Strictly speaking, McDowell ought to have spoken here of a way a second nature should be.) Again, McDowell says that ‘any second nature of the relevant kind, not just virtue, will seem to its possessor to open his eyes to reasons for acting. What is distinctive about virtue, in the Aristotelian view, is that the reasons a virtuous person takes himself to discern really are reasons; a virtuous person gets this kind of thing right’ (McDowell 1998a, 189). See, again, the propensity to speak of ‘a specific second nature’, with the implication that there might be others, at (McDowell 2009a, 39).

15. The two are closely connected, in that, as McDowell puts it, ‘[v]irtue of character embodies the relevant proper state of practical logos, what Aristotle calls “phronēsis”’ (McDowell 1998a, 184). It is part of the remit of this paper to try to clarify the relation of embodiment in play here. One thing that is clear is that McDowell is here explicitly resisting the view of ‘many modern commentators’, as he says, who ‘separate phronēsis from the formed character – second nature – that is Aristotle’s concern in [book 2 of NE]: they take his view to be that phronēsis [an intellectual virtue] equips one’s reason to issue the right orders to one’s formed character, the point of character-formation being that it makes one’s second nature willing in its obedience to reason’s commands’. But McDowell takes it that for Aristotle ‘the moulding of character is (in part) the shaping of reason’ (McDowell 1998a, 184 n 33).

16. For discussion of the Aristotelian version of the doctrine of the unity of the virtues, see especially (Irwin 1988; Halper 1999; Gottlieb 2009; Russell 2009, 2014; Bonasio 2020).

17. Giulia Bonasio has recently defended a reading of the doctrine of the unity of the virtues in Aristotle which makes the unity encompass still more than what is considered here (Bonasio 2020). Placing the discussion of the ‘common books’ of Eudemian Ethics and Nicomachean Ethics in the context of EE, Bonasio argues that according to Aristotle the best agent is the kalos kagathos. This agent possesses all the virtues, where this includes sophia (Aristotle’s other leading intellectual virtue) as well as phronēsis.

18. See e.g. (Irwin 1988); (Deslauriers 2002); (Russell 2014).

19. (Gottlieb 2009), chapter 5, emphasises the significance of phronēsis being meta tou orthou logou.

20. Russell (2014, 214) goes so far as to as to say that McDowell is ‘the only modern supporter of the full-blown reciprocity thesis’ known to him (and refers to (McDowell 1998b). I’m not sure that Russell’s supposition is correct, but he is right that McDowell fully endorses Aristotle’s doctrine.

21. A topic I will not broach here is the question whether McDowell’s conception of ethical outlooks itself involves him in a kind of ethical relativism, although this is a question that is bound to come up given McDowell’s insistence that ethical outlooks can only be scrutinised from within. An answer to this question will have a bearing on the issue under consideration here, of the relation between phronēsis and ethical outlooks; but I focus here only on the feature of ethical outlooks that they are local, leaving the question of relativity aside.

22. Lear emphasises that he is offering a philosophical reconstruction of what Plenty Coups may have thought. That Lear sensibly eschews historical claims about what Plenty Coups really did think reflects the complexity of discussion of thick ethical concepts and the cultural context that gives them meaning. This is relevant to the present discussion, by bringing out that determining the content and contour of an ethical outlook is never, and cannot be, a simple matter.

23. I here consider only Lear’s reconstruction of what Plenty Coups may have thought. I leave aside all consideration of the historical question whether Plenty Coups did in fact bring his people into a viable new ethical outlook (one which involved massive adjustment to the demands of white people), or whether the raging defiance of Sitting Bull, the Sioux chief, was not a superior manifestation of courage in the analogous predicament faced by the Sioux people.