The Self that Recedes: A Phenomenology of Virtue
J. Jeremy Wisnewski
Hartwick College
Providing a phenomenology of virtue might well seem presumptuous. If one is not a moral
sage oneself (a phronimos), on what basis can one construct a phenomenology of virtue?
Fortunately, even those who fall short of virtue have access to its phenomenology.
Descriptions of the experience of virtue are no more difficult to find than theoretical
accounts of it. To capture the phenomenology of virtue, then, we will need to rely on the core
features of virtue found in descriptions of it— both theoretical and practical. Any
phenomenology of virtue will be answerable to these descriptions. An adequate
phenomenology of virtue will capture the core theoretical commitments of virtue ethics,
making such commitments experientially resonant, and illuminating those descriptions of the
experience of virtue we find in a wide variety of sources.
There is perhaps no more famous or influential account of virtue than the one we find
in Aristotle. My aim in what follows is to provide a phenomenology of virtue that captures
the core features of Aristotle’s account of the phronimos. Although it is certainly possible
that Aristotle is wrong about the features of a virtuous life, one must begin somewhere—and
Aristotle’s account of virtue, whatever its faults, remains one of the most persuasive and
robust available to us.
I take the following to be core elements of Aristotle’s account of virtue, and hence as
those things any phenomenology of virtue must acknowledge: first, virtue involves
perception, not merely judgment; second, virtue is autotelic, valuable for its own sake; third,
virtue is not the same as knowledge; fourth, virtue crucially involves the emotions; finally,
1
virtue involves experiencing the world in a non-ego-centric way—it involves what a will call
a ‘recessive self.’
My task in what follows will be to provide a model of perception that both makes
Aristotle’s view plausible and reveals something about the structure of virtuous experience. I
will begin by presenting an enactivist view of perception rooted in J.J. Gibson’s notion of
affordances.1 I will argue that perception is constituted fundamentally by a recognition of the
possible actions available to an acting agent. I will refine this account by arguing that moods
and emotions further perceptually delineate possible actions. The phenomenology of virtue, I
contend, is best understood on the model of attunement to those possibilities of action
characteristic of virtue. It is, I will argue, a kind of perceptual expertise that shares several of
the features of expert action generally: it is auto-telic, self-recessive, and largely nondeliberative. The way one comes to such experiences, I will further argue, is crucial to their
being what they are.
Perception, Affordances, and Virtue
Aristotle regarded moral expertise as fundamentally perceptual in character. The
morally wise person (phronimos), on Aristotle’s view, literally sees the world differently.2
“[Phronesis] is of the ultimate particular, of which there is not scientific knowledge but
perception—not sensory perception, but like the perception whereby we perceive that the
1
See J.J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979). For an
excellent discussion of the idea of affordances as ontologically primary, and one to which I owe a significant
intellectual debt, see John T. Sanders “Affordances: An Ecological Approach to First Philosophy,” in Perspective
on Embodiment: The Intersection of Nature and Culture, edited by Gail Weiss and Honi Fern Haber (New York
and London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 121-141.
2
Admittedly, some argue that Aristotle thinks of phronesis only as figuratively perceptual. For a defense of the
claim that this is literal perception, as well as a reply to those who argue otherwise, see Pavlos Kontos’
excellent Aristotle’s Moral Realism Reconsidered: Phenomenological Ethics, New York and London: Routledge,
2011.
2
triangle is the ultimate particular in geometry” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1142a27-29).3
To become virtuous is thus to alter the way the world is disclosed. My first task in providing
a phenomenology of virtue is to provide a model for how we might understand this claim in
more-or-less literal terms.
The crucial distinction that Aristotle invokes in claiming that phronesis is perceptual
is a distinction between perceiving and judging. Phronetic knowledge is perceptual because it
is not the result of conscious judgment.4 Perception is immediate; judgment is not. Thus, to
claim that the phronimos perceives moral facts is not to say that the phronimos makes the
correct judgments about the facts once those facts are perceived. Indeed, judgments (at least
of the conscious sort) are precisely what Aristotle wants to rule out when discussing
phronesis.
What, then, is phronetic perception a perception of? If we begin with a passive view
of perception (like a sense-data theory)—where we merely soak up the neutral world around
us—we will not get far in adequately answering this question. I thus propose to begin with
the premise that perception is enactive—that it is fundamentally a relationship between a
purposive embodied intelligence dynamically engaging in the world around it. On this view,
perception is not best understood as the raw data-acquisition of a being with sensory organs.
Rather, perception can be characterized as the recognition of affordances—as the perception
of possibilities of action within a situation. Affordances can be either basic or acquired. To
perceive an object is to recognize something that can be manipulated: something that can be
3
On a reading of the simile of the sun (made famous by Iris Murdoch), Plato advocated the same basic ability.
See her The Sovereignty of the Good.
4
On one view, perceptions are always judgments, albeit non-conscious ones. I have no desire, nor yet a need,
to enter this debate in the current paper. I would note, however, that, if we can make sense of phrases like
‘non-conscious judgments,’ the phenomenology of such judgments will be importantly different from the ones
with which we are familiar. This in itself is a good reason not to assimilate the two things.
3
held, or thrown, or stood upon. As I will argue, the core of virtue—of phronetic perception—
is training oneself to have those emotional states which allow one to perceive the appropriate
range of possible actions within situations.
Perception as Perception of Affordances
The core idea of perception as enaction is captured in Merleau-Ponty’s claim that
consciousness is not a matter of thinking, but of acting. To be aware of the world is to be
aware of one’s possibilities for acting within that world. Perception is, then, never neutral—it
is always intrinsically linked to the kind of being engaged in perception as well as the
possibilities open to the specific entity perceiving the world. At the most basic level of
perception, we find what I will call primary affordances: a range of possible actions and
movements that are made possible by one’s biology—the possession of arms and legs, or
echolocation, or sensitivity to color, to take some rather obvious examples. On this view of
perception, what one perceives is always indexed to (and made possible by) a world of
possible action, and this world is structured in terms of the kinds of perceptual capacities a
given organism has. By contrast, secondary affordances are those action-possibilities that are
acquired by training, and which further delineate the perceptual world of an organism.
What is disclosed to a tick, to borrow an example from Jakob Uexkull, will not be
identical to what is disclosed to a human being. Ticks perceive the presence of butyric acid,
and this exhausts their perceptual world. The perception of butyric acid marks the realm of
possible action for the tick—when such acid is detected, the tick recognizes it is time to fall
from its place in a tree (for example) in order to attach to the mammal it detects. The
perceptual world of the tick just is a world in which butyric acid is or is not present.
4
Moreover, the presence of butyric acid defines the possibilities of actions for the tick (to
remain in the tree or to fall from it, attaching to the mammal detected with the presence of
butyric acid).
Humans, of course, perceive a great many more possibilities than the tick, but the
example is important nonetheless: on this model of perception, perception is fundamentally
structured in terms of action, and is to be understood as applying to any organism that
perceives. Indeed, on this view, perception just is the perception of possible modes of action;
hence, anything that can be said to perceive perceives in terms of possible action within the
world. Affordances, on this view, are perceptually basic.
None of this yet explains why perceptions differ. Human beings share a primary set
of affordances. Why, then, do we not all perceive exactly the same action possibilities across
situations? The answer to this question is straightforward, and all ready well developed in the
literature on virtue ethics: perception can be trained. Obviously, there a great many ways this
can happen. Through trial and error with a competent mentor, humans can come to be able to
immediately identify aspects of their perceptual environment that were formerly hidden to
them: one can taste things in wine that were unavailable before, or hear musical intervals that
would otherwise go unnoticed. One can likewise learn to identify the sex of newborn
chickens at a glance, despite the inability to articulate exactly what differences one is
noticing.
Aristotle identifies emotional perception as crucial to moral action, and much of the
literature in virtue ethics follows suite. Rather than trying to articulate the many kinds of
perception that can be developed, then, I will concentrate just on emotional perception—the
very thing Aristotle regards as the core of the so-called ‘moral virtues’, and the very thing
5
that he identifies as being transformed through habituation. To round out my account of
affordances, I want to sketch the sense in which emotions themselves can be understood as
the perception of possible actions.
Emotions (broadly construed) constitute a means by which particular affordances
stand out in our perceptual environment. Love reveals things in a particular way, disclosing
not just the thing loved but also how we should relate to that thing. Depression, likewise, can
rob our affordances of their worth: to be depressed is to no longer see a wide range of actions
as worth pursuing. Because emotions are not merely the subjective froth atop all
perception—because they partially constitute what we perceive—there is no such thing as an
emotionless perception (“Dasein always has its mood,” as Heidegger says).5 Our emotions
are a constitutive element of what particular affordances are revealed to us in any particular
instance. Sadness can prevent us from recognizing particular action-opportunities, or can lead
to us seeing these opportunities as not worth pursuing. Anger can likewise lead certain
action-opportunities to dominate our perceptual field. In rage, one sees what ought to be done
in a way qualitatively distinct from other emotions. Indeed, part of what it means to be
enraged is to perceive certain affordances and not others: smashing an object stands out as a
possible action when I am enraged in a way that it simply doesn’t when I am in a mood of
calm detachment.
Emotions are neither entirely passive nor merely subjective. We are not merely slaves
to our emotions, nor are our emotions the merely internal states of a mind trying to represent
the world. Moods and emotions register changes in the environment. On the James-Lange
5
My account of emotions here, as I hope is obvious, is deeply Heideggerian. Although I am using the term
‘emotion’, much of what I say stems directly from Heidegger’s account of mood (Stimmung) in Being and
Time. I do not intend to conflate the two things, however. The term ‘mood’ is much broader in Heidegger than
the term ‘emotion.’ Restaurants and epochs can have their Stimmungen; it would be awkward to say they
have their ‘emotions.’
6
theory of emotion, we should understand an emotion itself as a means by which the body
prepares for action. Emotions are thus always related to a world, and responsive to it.
Moreover, we can learn to be less likely to experience a given emotion (rage, depression, or
even love). This means that emotions are both cognitive in the broad sense that they tell us
about the world we inhabit, and responsive to training.
My aim in sketching this model of perception is not to establish its accuracy. Such a
task is obviously beyond the reach of an essay of this length. My aim, rather, is to show that
there are plausible models of perception that allow us to understand virtue itself as perceptual
in character. The model of affordances does exactly this: when one acquires phronesis, one
sees what a particular situation demands, and responds accordingly. This is achieved through
the appropriate kind of training of the emotions. All perception is to be understood as
perception of action-possibilities. The virtuous person perceives the world differently
precisely because they see the range of possible actions more perspicuously and immediately.
Emotions themselves, as perceptual in character, reveal action possibilities: sympathy reveals
the possibility of a loving response; anger reveals the possibility of aggressive action, and so
on. What is to be done and what can be done appear to the phronimos in the right way
because the phronimos has trained herself to have the right emotions in the right ways and at
the right times.
Flow Experience: Expertise and Moral Action
Much like other forms of perception, emotional perception can be improved. This suggests
that perception admits of expertise. In what follows, I will argue (following Julia Annas,
Hubert Dreyfus, and others) that expertise in the sphere of the virtues is structurally similar to
7
expertise in other spheres.6 I will further suggest (again following Annas7) that Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi’s work on ‘optimal experience’ (‘flow’ experience) provides several clues
to the structure of a phenomenology of virtue. Specifically, Csikszentmihalyi claims that
‘flow’ experience is auto-telic, non-deliberative, and self-recessive.8 My primary aim will be
to demonstrate the extent to which these features of ‘flow’ can be said to capture the
phenomenology of virtue. I will argue that much of Aristotle’s own account of virtue
accords with many of the elements of ‘flow experience’ in Csikszentmihalyi’s work.
In Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi argues
that there eight distinct features of ‘flow’ experience.
First, the experience usually occurs when we confront tasks which we have a
chance of completing. Second, we must be able to concentrate on what we are
doing. Third and fourth, the concentration is usually possible because the task
undertaken has clear goals and provides immediate feedback. Fifth, one acts
with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the
worries and frustrations of everyday life. Sixth, enjoyable experiences allow
people to exercise a sense of control over their actions. Seventh, concern for
the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after
the flow experience is over. Finally, the sense of the duration of time is altered
(49).
6
Julia Annas “The Phenomenology of Virtue”; Hubert Dreyfus, “What is Moral Maturity?”
Julia Annas’ “The Phenomenology of Virtue” makes a compelling case that ‘flow’ experience captures several
elements of virtuous experience. I have learned a great deal from this article, and my indebtedness to it will
become apparent in what follows.
8
That is, in a ‘flow’ experience, I am engaged in an activity for its own sake, without the need for conscious
reflection regarding what I’m doing, and my concept of self has receded into the background of my current
concerns.
7
8
Although Csikszentmihalyi’s aim to excavate the phenomenology of enjoyment—of
experiences that people find most satisfying—his analysis has an immediate relevance to
discussions of virtuous action in general, of the actions of the phronimos in particular. What
characterizes flow experience, as we will see, is an absorption in one’s activity that navigates
between experiences one finds too challenging, and hence overwhelming, on the one hand,
and those experiences one finds too easy, and hence not worthy of our attention, on the other.
In a ‘flow’ experience, an agent is challenged in a way that does not exceed her competence,
but which calls upon her to utilize all of the expertise in her possession. Flow experiences, in
Csikszentmihalyi’s study, are found in a wide range of activities: rock-climbing, playing a
musical instrument, reading, and social interaction all admit of something like an expertise,
where one exercises one’s competence in a way that is absorbing, and which focuses one’s
energies on the task at hand. When one is involved in such experiences, Csikszentmihalyi
argues, one is no longer weighed on by the demands of the self. That is, the normal questions
that occur to most persons regarding their abilities, their course of action, the appropriateness
of their desires, and so on, are eclipsed by an experience that fully concentrates one’s
attention on the task at hand.
Flow experience, then, always presupposes a prior competence in the action one is
involved in. In playing chess, for example, thoughts about whether or not one will win the
game, or about one’s ability to play the game well, uniformly disrupt one’s immersion in the
game. The expert chess player will play most effectively to the extent that she is able to set
aside all such issues involving the self and fully concentrate on exercising her competence
within the game.
9
Admittedly, for an expert activity, whether typical or esoteric, a good deal of training
is required before such kinds of experiences are possible. In learning to play the piano, for
example, one will find obstacles to immersion in the activity of playing at nearly every turn:
one’s fingers don’t follow one’s intentions; one has to reflect on the notes represented in the
sheet music one is attempting to play; one may find even the simplest musical exercises
taxing, as they aim to stretch one’s competence. Similarly, learning to read, or to play a sport,
or to drive an automobile, takes significant time and energy in which one will have to
concentrate on what one is doing—usually following specific rules which, until completely
internalized, will impede one’s ability to immerse oneself completely in the activity in
question.9
Flow experience, then, is not automatically available for any activity. What counts as
effectively being able to engage in the activity is coming to develop a competence—coming
to a point where one no longer needs to think about the pedagogical rules one has thus far
followed; indeed, where one might recognize that the rules will sometimes need to be broken.
The pianist may well decide to include passing dissonant notes if the context is right; the
competent reader will skip over obvious typos, recognizing them for what they are; the
competent chess player may well decide not to defend her king adequately if other
opportunities emerge in the flow of a game. When one has acquired a competence in an
activity, absorption in the activity becomes possible, and, indeed, desirable. Rather than
worrying about how well one is following the rules, or what rules apply and in what way, the
competent agent simply acts.
9
See Dreyfus, “What is Moral Maturity? A Phenomenological Account of the Development of Ethical
Experitse”
10
Action within a flow experience, as we have seen, is effortless, and, in one respect at
least, non-reflective. This does not mean that, within flow experience, there is never any
thought. The chess player may think a great deal about how to proceed—indeed, this may
well be part of her competence. The reflection in question, however, is always reflection
within an activity rather than reflection about it. If one needs to reflect on how the bishop
moves, or on whether or not one is doing a good job of following the rules, then by definition
one is not yet a competent player of the game.
The model of flow experience provides us with a useful way of understanding some
of the core features of virtuous action, at least as articulated by Aristotle. First, as Aristotle
insists, the virtuous person experiences pleasure in acting virtuously.10 Second, as Aristotle
suggests, while the virtuous person does require some kind of knowledge of what he is doing,
this knowledge is the ‘least important’ feature of virtuous action. Third, in acting virtuously,
the virtuous agent does what he does for its own sake. Finally, for an action to be virtuous, it
must flow from a firm and unchanging character.
Csikszentmihalyi’s work, as I’ve indicated, endeavors to understand the core features
of enjoyment. The upshot of his research is precisely that enjoyment is constituted by optimal
(or ‘flow’) experiences. If virtue is a techne—if it involves a kind of expertise—we should
expect, as Aristotle rightly insists, that the virtuous person will enjoy acting virtuously.11 If
the skill in question is a skill that is fundamentally about praxis rather than episteme—about
action rather than abstract knowledge—one’s ability to articulate what one sees in a given
situation, or to articulate what justifies one course of action over another, will necessarily be
10
See 1099a15-20:“Virtuous actions must be in themselves pleasant”
Csikszentmihalyi distinguishes pleasure from enjoyment, noting that pleasure is far less meaningful than
enjoyment. His remarks fit Aristotle’s claims about the sense in which virtuous action is pleasant, and the kind
of pleasure it occasions.
11
11
secondary to the ability to act in the right way to begin with. Analogously, an expert pianist
may not be able to say all that much about how to move your fingers as rapidly and with the
precision that he has attained, but this would hardly mean he was not an expert pianist; an
expert chess player may not be able to say how to ‘see’ a checkmate several moves in
advance, but it hardly follows from this that he is unable to do it. In all such cases, of course,
the expert will have a practical knowledge of how to proceed competently, but may lack the
ability to articulate this competence in necessary and sufficient conditions. Virtue, as
Aristotle forcefully argues, is not the same as knowledge.
We have also seen that flow experience is auto-telic. This is not an incidental feature
of such experiences. On the contrary, it is only in auto-telic experiences that one can become
fully absorbed in one’s activity. If one is constantly concerned with goals external to one’s
practice, one will never achieve flow experiences within that practice.12
Finally, a flow experience allows us to understand the important connection between
competence and action that characterizes expert engagement. A lousy pianist might
accidently play a brilliant phrase; an incompetent chess player may inadvertently mate an
opponent. Flow experience occurs when competence is exercised against the right level of
challenge. Without such competence, flow within a practice is unattainable. The virtuous
person acts virtuously precisely because she has developed the required abilities. One cannot
be virtuous accidentally, much as one cannot be a great chess player accidentally, despite the
fact that lousy players might occasionally make good moves, and vicious people may
occasionally do things that we regard as the right thing to do. To properly call these expert
12
Admittedly, much of our action is composed of both autotelic and exotelic moments. I do not mean to
suggest otherwise.
12
actions would require that they flow from the right kind of understanding, in the right way, at
the right time, and so on.
What I have said so far, I hope, is sufficient for demonstrating the fruitfulness of the
model of perception of affordances, on the one hand, and flow experience, on the other, in
understanding the sense in which virtue can be argued to be a kind of perceptual expertise
(techne). First, phronesis is literally perceptual—it involves possessing emotional states in
such a way that one will recognize the distinct action-possibilities required by virtue. Second,
one must be habituated into phronesis—our perception of affordances must be trained by
training ourselves to have the appropriate emotional reactions to the world around us, lest our
emotions blind us to the proper actions in a given context. Third, once expertise is attained,
virtue becomes its own reward—that is, as a ‘flow’ experience, it is auto-telic. Fourth,
deliberation about how to be virtuous and the reliance on rules for how to be virtuous are no
longer necessary. One may well deliberate about how best to act, but such deliberation will
be within phronetic perception rather than about it.
The Recession of the Self in Virtuous Action
1
The core features of flow experience, as we have seen, are that it is autotelic and selfeffacing. The latter feature requires some discussion if it is to be properly understood. To say
that an experience is self-effacing can be understood in several ways. To prevent
misunderstanding, I offer, in summary form, the following addenda:
1. To say that the self recedes is not to say that the self has no place at all within the
phenomenology of expertise. To recede is not to disappear entirely.
13
2. To say that the self recedes is not to say that there is nothing that could be called selfconsciousness in virtuous activity.
To say that the ‘self’ recedes is not to say that it is given no thought or concern. Recession
need not mean absence. The point is rather that the self does not dominate one’s perception
of a situation. Aristotle argues that an appropriate interest in the self is crucial to the
deliberation of the phronimos. Interestingly, one’s ‘care for the self’ in this case is nearly
impossible to mistake for self-obsession. It would be more accurate to say that one is
required to care for selves, in Aristotle’s view, but one’s own self isn’t any more important
than that of, say, one’s friend (a ‘second self,’ Aristotle notes).13
What is this ‘self’ that recedes? By ‘self’ I do not mean self-consciousness. To say the
self recedes is not to say that in such experience there is no self-consciousness. Our
experiences of the world may well necessarily involve an experience of something like a
self.14 The claim that phronetic perception is self-recessive is agnostic on this issue:
awareness of our agency may or may not be implicit in all of our perceptions and actions. By
‘self’ I thus do not mean anything like ‘agency’ simpliciter. Rather, I mean to pick out two
specific (related) things: First, the set of self-regarding interests that most of us consider as
we engage in normal action. Second, I mean the bearer of those interests which we construct
in thinking about these self-regarding interests.
A self-regarding interest, as I am using the phrase, has two qualities: First, it is an
interest that one has simply in virtue of being the person one is. Second, it is an interest that I
have specifically because I perceive it as benefitting me. My interest in winning the lottery is
13
For an excellent article on this point, see Anne Marie Dziob, “Friendship- Self-Love and Moral Rivalry”,
Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 46, No. 4 (June, 1993), pp. 781-801.
14
See Dan Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity, Northwestern, 1999, and Shawn Gallagher, How the Body
Shapes the Mind.
14
specifically about my winning the lottery, not about just anyone winning. I have that interest
precisely because I would benefit from winning the lottery. There are two natural contrasts to
this class of interests: other-regarding interests, on the one hand, and non-self-regarding
interests, on the other. I have genuine interests in the happiness of my wife, for example. I
likely would not have such interests if I did not know my wife (so the interest does depend on
me being the person I am). The interest is not self-regarding, however, because I do not have
the interest solely because I perceive my wife’s happiness as benefitting me. Rather, I have
an interest in my wife’s happiness because I love her, and care about her well-being. My
interest in preserving the natural environment, to provide another example, would be neither
a self-regarding nor an other-regarding interest. I value the natural environment for its own
sake (not because it benefits me specifically). Moreover, my interest in the preservation of
the environment has little to do with the person I happen to be (the interest is not essentially
constituted by my having a particular identity). This interest, then, is non-self-regarding.
Given the above characterization of self-regarding interests, then, what does it mean
to say that virtue involves the recession of the self? In claiming that virtue is self-recessive,
as the above distinctions make clear, we are not claiming that phronesis involves only the
consideration of what might be called ‘universal’ interests by some ideal rational agent. The
resurgence of attention to the virtue tradition in recent years is in no small part due to a
dissatisfaction with just this kind of universalist model of moral life—a model in which only
an abstract, disinterested rational agent is the only agent in an appropriate epistemic position
to make justifiable (and universal) moral judgments.15 This model has been criticized from a
wide variety of positions, from communitarian to care ethicist, for ignoring the situatedness
15
This kind of model is often attributed to both deontology and utilitarianism in virtually all of their guises.
Such a model also seems to fit Habermas’s programmatic attempts at a discourse ethics.
15
of human action, pretending we somehow exist apart from those fundamental relationships
which dialogically constitute us.16 Any theory that ignores these relationships in favor of
abstract ethical principles (such as principles of justice, or of universalizability) ignores the
texture of our lives in favor of generalizable rules, and hence misses crucial elements of the
moral life.
In phronesis, I still have interests, and some of these interests depend crucially on
who I am. The fact that I am a father, a husband, a teacher situates me in a set of
relationships, each of which involves attendant moral demands. To be a (good) father means
to have interests in my children’s well-being, and to have these interests even if they entail
sacrificing other interests that might directly benefit me. Who I am, then, is not irrelevant to
what my obligations are. Phronesis still involves other-regarding interests—and ones that
depend on the particular identity I have. The reason I have such interests, though, is not to be
found in the fact that the interest benefits me.
How, then, are we to characterize a phenomenology in which self-regarding interests
are dominant? The idea of the self seems to emerge out of reflection, as a narrative
construction.17 This does not entail, however, that the self only enters one’s
phenomenological field in moments of reflection. Thoughts about the self (and self-regarding
interests) can be immediate in one’s phenomenology. In such cases, one sees the world and
privileges one’s own narratively-constructed self in that world. One sees through one’s selfreferring interests. This point does not require belief in anything like a protean self. On this
view, rather, the self is entirely (or perhaps only largely) constructed in the narrative space
one uses to understand one’s life. But the self so constructed comes to dominate one’s
16
See, for example, Sandel, Gilligan, MacIntyre.
See, for example, Aron Gurwitsch, “A Non-Egological Conception of Consciousness,”
Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology, especially 293-4.
17
16
experiential world. In confronting a situation, the realm of possible actions open to me is
constrained and informed by those things that will directly harm or benefit me. In the normal
experience of most people, I hypothesize, the presence of such self-regarding interests is the
norm—though we should also admit that it is rare for such interests to be the only kind any
particular agent has. Our normal experience of situations involves seeing our possibilities of
action within the situation in terms informed by what we pre-reflectively believe will be
optimal for us, given who we are. This does not mean that something like psychological
egoism is true. It means, rather, that, in normal experience, certain affordances stand out over
others precisely because these affordances have a direct bearing on our state-of-being in the
world. This is not to say that normal people always do those things that they perceive as
beneficial to them; it is to say, rather, that these possibilities of action are often the most
obvious to us, even if opt not to choose them.
It is precisely this, I think, that marks one change in the phenomenology of the
phronimos: the phronimos no longer experiences things in such terms; the place of the self is
no longer such that those actions that will most benefit it stand as the most obvious
possibilities of action. To reiterate: the claim here is that such self-regarding interests recede,
not that they disappear. The phronimos need not lose the ability to recognize what actions
would most benefit her. Indeed, part of the wisdom of phronesis is precisely that one does see
such actions for what they are. The claim is that these affordances no longer have the same
phenomenological primacy and urgency that they do in most of us, most of the time.
In expertise generally, one’s self recedes and one is absorbed into the world one
encounters. One is affectively engaged in that world to such an extent that other concerns do
not present themselves—or, at any rate, do not present themselves so pressingly. Virtue, I
17
have argued, has precisely this character. The self is there, and can re-emerge at any moment,
but it is recessed. What concerns one is not one’s self-regarding interests, but rather what is
happening in the arena of one’s concern—in the situation one encounters.
The phronimos experiences the world differently, and part of the structure of this
difference is in the place accorded to one’s self-regarding interests in experience. The world
of the phronimos is not one that is colonized by endless thoughts of how something relates to
these interests. He is not distracted by such interests, or by reflection on them. The
phronimos has interests, it is true—and these are vital to all moral deliberation and action—
but these interests are much wider than those of mere self-interest; their orbit does not have at
its center the ever-demanding ego. This is the core difference between normal self-recessive
expert action and virtuous expertise: most of our expert action, most of the time, can be
characterized in terms of the presence of latent self-regarding interests—ones that are not
consciously present while I exercise my competence (hence allowing flow experience), but
which carve out the space of affordances nevertheless. As I decide to play chess, or learn to
play the piano, I do so against a background of understanding in which my self-regarding
interests loom large. It is precisely this, I am claiming, that changes in the phenomenology of
the phronimos.
2
My discussion thus far has aimed to make it clear what it means to say that the self
recedes in virtuous action. I have not yet given any explicit arguments for the view. What,
then, is the evidence for the claim that the self is indeed recessive in the phenomenology of
virtue? At least two arguments can be given.
18
1. Flow experience in general is self-recessive. If we can use flow experience as a model
of virtue, virtue will possess this characteristic as well, even though it will differ in
detail.
2. A great many descriptions of virtuous action and the virtuous person describe
precisely this characteristic of moral experience.
The first argument, I think, requires little comment. If flow experience captures the structural
features of virtue, we have at least some evidence that virtue is self-recessive. The evidence,
of course, is inconclusive. After all, it may well be the case that virtuous experience has
most, but not all, of the features normally associated with ‘flow.’ This, however, is hardly
surprising. Any description of the phenomenology of virtue must, at the end of the day, be
answerable to the experiences themselves. In describing flow experience as being auto-telic,
we recognize a standard feature of virtue. It is this recognition that makes the model of flow
experience a probably one, and not the other way around. To determine whether or not virtue
involves the recession of the self, then, we ultimately have recourse only to what the
experiences of virtue themselves present. Given that few would be willing to claim
themselves as moral sages, we are left with examining the descriptions of virtuous experience
offered by others. For those seeking a logical proof of the claim I am defending here, this
will undoubtedly fall short of the mark. For the phenomenologist, however, this is exactly
what we ought to expect.18
This basic idea—that the self is not given excessive deliberative weight, and that it is
not dominant in one’s perception of a situation—is one that we find enshrined in every major
moral theory. The utilitarian demands that we treat our own interests as of no more moment
18
Aristotle recognized this point as well: only certain kinds of knowledge admit of logical proof. To insist that
all knowledge must be acquired in this way is to confuse truth with method, and to impoverish the many ways
we can know the world.
19
than anyone else’s. Kant demands that we never make an exception of ourselves—and that
we recognize how much self-obsession can blind us to our own motivations. The danger is so
great, in fact, that Kant even claims it is impossible to know with certainty our own
motivations for any action. The self (or, perhaps more accurately, obsession with oneself) is a
central source of moral error. Learning to put oneself in one’s place, so to speak, is a central
concern for ethics in general.
But the pedigree for this view is broader than just western philosophy. The Christian
imperative to “love thy neighbor as thy self” also recognizes our tendency to be motivated by
a bloated sense of our own importance. A recognition of this tendency is also (arguably)
what’s behind many meditative practices—particularly those that aim to get one to see that
the ‘self’ is illusory. Indeed, demonstrating that the self recedes in proper moral experience
has been a hallmark of virtually every moral tradition—from East to West. In fact, I know of
no religious tradition in which one cannot find precisely this point.
In The Varieties of Religious Experience, moreover, William James finds precisely
what we are calling the recession of the self in the descriptions of saints throughout the
Western religious traditions, and not just in the descriptions offered by theologians and
philosophers.19 If we make the modest assumption that the term ‘saint’ is meant to be a moral
designation quite close to the term phronimos, then James’ study offers us a treasure-trove of
supporting evidence: based on dozens of available descriptions of saintly experience, James
characterizes the saint as someone with “a feeling of being in a wider life than that of this
world’s selfish little interests,” and as someone who can experience “an immense elation and
freedom, as the outlines of the confining selfhood melt down,” (273). In the saint, moreover,
19
James sees this feature in Eastern traditions as well, but the material he had access to was much more
limited.
20
James claims there is “a shifting of the emotional centre towards loving and harmonious
affections, towards ‘yes, yes,’ and away from ‘no,’ where the claims of the non-ego are
concerned.” (273)
Saintliness, in James’ view, is not necessarily a phenomenon of religion—one can
have a saintly character without any attachment to one religion over another (a good reason
to read ‘saint,’ at least as James uses it, as being very close to the term ‘phronimos’). The
core of this character is “an inborn genius for certain emotions” (265)—an ability to feel, and
hence to see, what others cannot, or cannot without much strain. The saint, by contrast, is
able to simply act—“he is free of all that inner friction and nervous waste” (265).
James’ account of the saint, I am urging, verifies precisely those core features of the
phenomenology of virtue I have been discussing. The moral sage—the very person James has
in mind in his discussion of saintliness—is characterized by a different kind of perception of
the world and her actions within it. The character of this perception is one where the standard
self-regarding interests that dominate our normal phenomenology ‘melt away’—where the
self recedes into the background of one’s phenomenological field, and in which such
recession allows the world to appear in a new way. The saint (phronimos) experiences the
world differently, and accomplishes this by maintaining a different attunement to the
world—by having, as James puts it, “an inborn genius for certain emotions.”
I want to reiterate that my appeal to moral and religious traditions, on the one hand,
and James, on the other, is not to be understood on the model of deductive proof. Whether or
not the self is in fact recessive in the phenomenology of virtue will not be decided by an
appeal to authority, traditional or otherwise. My aim in citing such evidence is largely
confirmation rather than justification. But I want to emphasize first that the appeal to such
21
traditions should be understood as an appeal to the lived experience of those who have
participated in them (not to doctrine or to dogma), and second that we should not expect any
investigation into the phenomenology of virtue to be founded on anything other than the
lived experience of agents. Put otherwise: if an appeal to lived experience—whether
enshrined in theory or not—won’t count as evidence, then nothing will.
Despite the significant evidence for the view that virtue involves the recession of the
self, we should not conclude that such a recession is sufficient for virtue. First, as we have
seen, flow experience in general is self-recessive. Second, and more importantly, there are
modes of experience that are both self-recessive and the very epitome of the vicious. Thus,
while I accept the view that the dominance of self-regarding interests is a central source for
much immoral action, I do not accept the claim that any experience where self-regarding
interests are set aside will therefore be a virtuous one. The recession of self-regarding
interests, in other words, is a necessary feature of the phenomenology of virtue, but it is not a
sufficient one.
Aristotle emphasized that the way one acquires one’s traits is crucial to what they in
fact are. Natural virtue—being born with dispositions to behave virtuously—is, at the end of
the day, not the same as virtue.20 Moreover, Aristotle insisted that a virtuous action must
stem from the right kind of character to count as virtuous at all. In what follows, I will take
these claims for granted, and try to show why they are as important for the current account as
they are for Aristotle’s.
One of the most disturbing features of combat is how much many human beings
relish it. J. Glenn Gray’s The Warriors: Men in Combat makes the point forcefully. “War as
spectacle, as something to see,” Gray argures, “ought never to be underestimated” (29). The
20
See Nicomachean Ethics, Book 4, Chapter 13.
22
feeling of spectacle—of loss of one’s participation in the events around one, of the
Nietzschean Apollonian—can overtake one. In certain moments, the experience of war
amounts to an experience of the sublime.
The awe that steals over us at times is not essentially a feeling of triumph, but,
on the contrary, a recognition of power and grandeur to which we are subject.
There is not so much a separation of the self from the world as a subordination
of the self to it. We are able to disregard personal danger at such moments by
transcending the self, by forgetting our separateness. (35)
Self-recessive, non-deliberative, autotelic experiences are not automatically virtuous ones.
When one loses oneself in a combat environment, or in a novel, or in a project—when the
sublime steals over one in any of its forms—one is not automatically made virtuous.
Perhaps the most disturbing accounts of soldiers who have lost their sense of self, and
who relish their destructive actions, is to be found in the case of the ‘berserker.’ Jonathan
Shay’s work provides extended examples of the self-recessive experiences of those engaged
in acts of brutality: as they mutilate corpses they have no thought of their own agency—they
are totally absorbed in the immediate activity, seemingly engaging in it for its own sake.21
Not thinking of oneself, then, is not sufficient to virtue, nor is engaging in activity regarded
as valuable for its own sake. Both of these features are present in berserker phenomenology,
and no one would consider this virtuous action.
The way to distinguish such cases of auto-telic and self-recessive experiences from
the experience of virtue, I want to suggest, is one already identified by Aristotle: the source
of one’s experience matters a great deal. A virtuous action, Aristotle contends, must stem
from a “firm and unchangeable character.” Put otherwise, one must have developed patterns
21
See Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character.
23
of perception that are not liable to change radically when one encounters a new situation.
One’s perceptual expertise, moreover, is such that it has been acquired through practice—
through trial and error, and the correction of earlier mistakes. The history of one’s perceptual
expertise is not incidental to it; it gives one’s perceptual experience the trustworthiness and
stability required for virtue. In the case of what I have called ‘berserker phenomenology,’
moreover, we find a remarkably different etiology of self-recessive experience: it is born of
trauma, of an inability to experience things as one experienced them prior to some traumatic
event or set of events. Moreover, the self-recessive character of traumatic experience is
typically highly episodic and unpredictable. In this respect, the character of the experience
mirrors its originating conditions: a gradual process of training one’s perception yields firm,
reliable perceptual competence; the abrupt, traumatic dismantling of one’s phenomenological
world, on the other hand, yields chaotic, unpredictable experience.
Conclusion
It is perhaps part of the nature of experience, as well as the language we use to describe it,
that there is always more to be said. This is undoubtedly true of my account of the
phenomenology of virtue. I have tried to provide a model for the phenomenology of virtue
that both captures its core features and elucidates Aristotle’s own account. I have argued that
we can understand virtuous experience as the perceptually immediate recognition of
affordances. I have further argued that phronetic perception admits of those structural
features found in expert action more generally (auto-teleology, non-deliberative absorption,
and self-recession). Finally, I have also suggested that the etiology of this experience matters
a great deal to its character.
24
As I indicated at the outset, my aim has been to capture something about the structure
of virtuous experience, and to do so in a way that was true to the core features of virtue
outlined by Aristotle. If I have made my case persuasively, we have at least the outlines of a
model of virtue as a kind of perceptual expertise that is valuable for its own sake, largely
non-deliberative, and which has overcome the self-obsession characteristic of so much nonphronetic action.
25