Willing the Means: Vardoulakis on Aristotle’s Ethics and Ineffectual Causation

ABSTRACT

If we set aside the questions of Heidegger’s (mis)translation of Aristotle, Vardoulakis’s diagnosis of Heidegger’s mistake still is pressing and far-reaching. The mistake Vardoulakis identifies arises from a preference for ‘ineffectual’ activity over ends-directed activity in Heidegger’s thought. Vardoulakis’s argument is that even phronesis is ends-directed and it is only because of this that phronesis leads not just to doing something well but to doing something well for the sake of the good. The emphasis on the ineffectual turns us away from a form of calculation in which ends, means, and their relation are in question.

KEYWORDS:

• ethics
• phronesis
• techne
• instrumentality
• Aristotle
• Heidegger

Notes

1 One could contrast this with the Aristotle’s claims in both the Nichomachean Ethics and the Politics that leisure is the telos of movement and work and is also the prerequisite for philosophy.