Comment on Sean D. Kirkland, Aristotle on Tragic Temporality
Presented at the Ancient Philosophy Society, New York City, April 2026
The project of interpretation
In Trump v. Slaughter, the U.S. Supreme Court considered whether the Executive has the right to remove officials of the Executive branch who have been placed there by the Legislature. The case hinged on a reading of the “take care” clause of the Constitution, “The President should take care that the laws are faithfully executed.” Following the unitary executive theory, the majority held that the president has complete authority over the executive. They read this clause to support that theory. But as Jamelle Bouie points out, this clause isn’t a grant of sovereignty. The straightforward plain reading is that it gives the president a fiduciary duty; it obliges the president to enforce the laws passed by Congress. Bouie draws a parallel to the way the current administration reads the 14th Amendment’s clause, “Subject to the jurisdiction of the laws therein” as “an esoteric arcane phrasing that demands additional interpretation,” yet, as Bouie explains, “a plain reader in 1868 or 1869 would have understood it to just mean, you’re subject to the laws, that’s all that means. And there are categories of peoples not subject to the laws.” Historically, this clause referred to the complicated legal and sovereign status of Indigenous tribes. Bouie proceeds to warn, “that conservatives and the conservative legal movement is taking pretty straightforward ideas and trying to make them seem more esoteric and complicated than they are for the express purpose of undermining them,… making them say the opposite of what they mean and then that is in service of a narrow ideological agenda.”[1]
How do we avoid being the people who are “taking pretty straightforward ideas and trying to make them seem more esoteric and complicated than they are for the express purpose of undermining them, to making them say the opposite of what they mean … in service of a narrow ideological agenda”? How do we avoid implying this approach is what is involved in reading historical texts? That is to say, is there a difference between the current SCOTUS’ reading of the “take care” clause and the equal protections clause and Kirkland’s reading of Aristotle’s Poetics?
Bouie describes the straightforward relevant reading as the one that would occur to the contemporary audience of the text. Kirkland invites us to consider how straightforward readings have become sedimented as straightforward by the confrontation of Aristotelian texts with modern philosophy’s investment in a division between the subject and the object. The conceptual frame of a knowing being divided from the world she seeks to engage first and foremost by knowing structures our view of what any thinker is doing in engaging the world. Instead of making Aristotle more esoteric then, Kirkland’s reading suggests that modernity has conflated Aristotle with Descartes as the current SCOTUS has conflated Project 2025 with the US constitution. Following Kirkland, we should take modernity’s reading of Aristotle and SCOTUS’ reading of the U.S. Constitution as the contrived and esoteric ones.
While the unitary executive theory arises from obscuring a straightforward reading, Kirkland offers a unitary Aristotelian theory that follows from illuminating the straightforward reading of the text thought in the epistemic horizon of its time. He joins a reading of change, movement and time in Aristotle’s Physics to a reading of tragedy and temporality in Aristotle’s Poetics and a reading of phronêsis’s intervention in a temporally situated human’s drive to act in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.
Kirkland interprets Aristotle’s depiction of change as by nature ekstatikon to capture what he calls “the radical ontology” (17) of the natural being as what it is by being beyond itself. Against modern conceptions of causation which treat the efficient cause as the only metaphysical cause and the others as epistemological explanations, Kirkland insists that all four causes do metaphysical work. Kirkland writes, “I would suggest that mainstream scholarship on Aristotle quite uniformly abides by a kind of naïve presentism in reading [Aristotle’s] texts and this is the explanation for the resistance [to reading Aristotle straightforwardly]—scholars insisting on domesticating, contorting, or even rewriting Aristotelian texts where he seems prepared to think, on the one hand, of certain causes as having causal efficacy and thus being, but being located in the past or future, and on the other hand, of the way of being of natural beings as stretched out beyond the present, being constituted in the present by a past archē and a future telos” (32).
Kirkland refers to “Aristotle’s ancient metaphysics of non-presence” which he argues is overlooked by careful readers of Aristotle who remain uncritical of the modern subject-objectparadigm through which they read the texts. While most Aristotle scholars operate “under the unstated and unexamined pre-supposition that ‘to be’ means ‘to be present’ for Aristotle” (32), Kirkland denies that this paradigm that separates us from the world is operative in Aristotle (32-3). And so, while Ross can’t fathom that the telos can be a cause from the future as an example in Posterior Analytics, for Kirkland, this future causal power is Aristotle’s point rather than a failure in logic (26). Itfunctions in the future the way the efficient cause functions in the past, in opposite directions (24). Kirkland furthers our understanding of Aristotle’s claim in Physics II.7 that the formal, final, and efficient causes coincide (ἔρχεται) in natural living substances by implying that these are each the same understood from a different temporal moment – the efficient is in the past, the final in the future, and the formal in the moment. Kirkland argues that by inventing the phrase to ti ēn einai, “Aristotle is stretching the essence through time, explicitly, and making it something that the being accomplishes in being itself. That is, the essence is not something that the being simply and brutely is or has. Indeed, we could see it as pointing back to the being’s gignesthai out of the material cause” (30). Material is not merely present in but that from which something comes to be, “in the way of being of the natural being, there is a gignesthai out of its material, an emergence from the material body” (29). Material’s temporality joins the past the present as the natural being comes out of the material and continues to be that out of which the living being continues to be moved by its final cause.
Tragedy’s Work: Contemplation or Deliberation?
That temporal theme sets Kirkland up to consider the insight of tragedy, wherein Kirkland complicates what has become an easy, too clean division between contemplation and deliberation. Kirkland writes, “This is the crucial insight. Tragedy functions by producing interruption and facilitating contemplation…the organizing aim of tragic drama is served when the actor steps out from the consuming and unifying revelry and demands to be attended to, contemplated as a human being” (155-6). And then further, “Every [innovation in the development in tragedy] allows for the presentation of a richer, more revealing image of human being to be attended to and contemplated by the audience of tragedy” (157). And again, “The reading of the origin story [of tragedy] compels us to treat the facilitation of contemplation as the primary, essential, and organizing aim of tragic drama, an aim established in the very first moment that the actor stepped out to be attended to by the dithyrambic chorus.” 158
My first question for Kirkland is: If tragedy facilitates contemplation, and contemplation is for itself and not a useful instrument for something else, how does contemplation serve practical life which requires facility in deliberation? What is the relation between contemplation and deliberation? I appreciate that contemplation in the sense of theôria, or seeing, examining the community as a whole, might bend toward the practical, with its roots in the theôros who would visit and observe neighboring festivals to see the customs and plays of other cities.[2] That observing might attune one to seeing the ethical situation. In this sense, the theôros is akin to the phronimos who has well-honed ethical perception.
Aristotle divides these ways of grasping the world. He writes in EN I.13, “For when we talk about someone’s character we do not say that he is theoretically-wise or has comprehension but that he is mild-mannered or temperate” (1103a6-7). He calls virtue twofold, of thought and of character (II.1). He writes, “[T]he present work is not undertaken for the sake of theoretical knowledge (for we are engaging in the investigation not in order to know what virtue is but in order to become good people…)” (EN II.2.1104a25-7). He tells us we don’t deliberate about eternal things or about things that change in the same way but about things that are “up to us and doable in action” (EN III.3.1112a21). Deliberation is nonetheless concerned with truth as Aristotle explains: “[I]n practical thought, the good state is truth in agreement with correct desire” (EN 1139a26-30).
We could say the truth of the finitude and the rational telos of the human is contemplated, not deliberated. The causes of the human are a matter for epistêmê. In that sense, tragedy leads us to see what it is to be human, to contemplate being human. The question is how contemplation informs and improves how we live, since determining what to do is a matter of deliberation. Insofar as knowing what it means to be human informs how we live, contemplation that tells us the active life of reason actualizes our humanity will make us better. But deliberating tells us what counts as, ta pros ta telē, living according to reason in this moment. Aristotle surely complicates this distinction when he writes, “For the eudaimonic person will always more than anyone else do actions and get a theoretical grasp on things in accord with virtue…” (EN I.10.1101a18-19) and when he writes, “First, then, we must get a theoretical grasp on the fact that states like these are naturally ruined by deficiency and excess…” (II.2.1104a10-12).
Aristotle says that we investigate this matter to become good; the theoretical grasp on virtue contributes to becoming virtuous. We might say the work of Nicomachean Ethics is contemplation that presents the framework of what deliberation entails. Perhaps Kikrland takes tragedy, like the work of Nicomachean Ethics, to be a contemplation whose knowledge frames and informs our deliberations in each ethical situation.
Tragedy’s Role in Our Ethical Education
Kirkland argues against the prevailing view in the scholarship that tragedy produces an emotional reaction or catharsis. He argues instead that tragedy produces a cognitive insight that informs our ethical comportment to the world. Kirkland distinguishes his position from the cognitivist interpretation, which fills the cognition with content to make tragedy didactic. I’m not convinced the cognition is entirely empty for Kirkland. He means specifically to deny that tragedy “provides its audience with concrete ethical or political rules or strategies, i.e. ‘moral laws and patterns,’ by which they might become more capable of producing or sustaining their own eudaimonia…” Rather than offer positive content, “[W]hat we undergo in the moment of tragic catharsis is simply an experience of our own insuperable finitude, the limitations on our understanding and on our power to secure our own happiness—specifically as a consequence of our way of being in time, our temporality. Indeed, tragedy will prove to be, for Aristotle, the poetic equivalent of an elenctic conversation with Socrates. One does not learn ‘what virtue is’ or what concretely one should or should not do in order to live well as a human being. Rather, it is revealed, suffering both the pain of ignorance and the pleasure of uncovering that ignorance in a safe environment, that what one had been previously blind to was one’s own profoundly limited human understanding and power. And in this, tragedy provides an insight that real life praxis necessarily obscures” (159-60).
Kirkland articulates a clear line from Socrates to Aristotle by showing how virtue is a practice just as the Socratic elenchus is a practice, and both involve self-examination for becoming virtuous. The emphasis on the cognitive, even as empty of content, seems to align Aristotle to the Socratic equation of virtue with knowledge, both in the sense of knowing a virtue and knowing oneself.
Following on the insight from Aeschylus that tragic recognition is “learning by suffering” (Ag. 177, 250), Kirkland suggests that tragedy’s suffering leads us to contemplate our own finitude. “Indeed, what tragedy allows us to learn, I argue, is that our way of being in relation to our past and future in praxis, our way of presuming to grasp completely and indeed to master the archê or ‘origin, beginning’ and the telos or ‘end, aim’ of that action, is an illusion, even if a necessary one. What comes to light, then, in experiencing the turn of fortune of a tragic protagonist is our own essentially human, irremediable and constant, exposure to erring, such that no matter how clearly we deliberate, no matter how carefully we proceed, we simply cannot as humans be certain that our actions will bring about happiness, rather than its opposite. And this condition of exposure, we see in tragedy, is due to the excessive, unknowable, and unmasterable past and future between which we are situated” (174-5). Kirkland reads ‘like us’ (ton homoion) at Poetics 1453a5 to mean “that we share in being human, and the errancy that causes the reversal of fortune appears in great tragedy to belong to human nature itself” (181), because being human is being finite, “essentially limited in our understanding of our world and ourselves and limited in our power to engineer our own happiness.” In this way, tragedy leads us to contemplate human nature in such a way that implicates us, as Kirkland puts it, “Importantly, we the audience come to this recognition not merely intellectually, for instance, by grasping a universal concept and applying it to ourselves, but rather experientially, or even, some would wish to say, emotionally.” 182-3
Kirkland elevates tragedy’s power by joining the emotional response to a cognitive insight. But the insistence on a cognitive insight returns us to the questions about whether and how cognitive insight achieved through contemplation serves our capacity to act virtuously. As Kirkland develops the way tragedy teaches, he defines mimêsis not in terms of re-presenting but “in terms of intervening in a natural process to bring about by mimetic means the end at which that process is aimed. Accordingly, the process in which this tragic mimesis would intervene would be that by which human beings naturally come to understand what presents itself to them in their experience, and more specifically, that part by which they come to understand themselves and the nature of their own praxis of ‘acting’ in the world, their own way of life” (168-9). Kirkland notes that “the moments when we are being human in the most fully realized sense” are those in which “Aristotle sees us deliberating, deciding, and taking action toward a desired goal.” Remarkably, Kirkland concludes from pinpointing the moment of ethical insight as the moment tragedy highlights that “tragedy’s organizing aim becomes provoking the contemplation specifically of human praxis” (169). Contemplation of action seems to do some work to make us better at deliberating, “deciding and taking action toward a desired goal.” I’m left wondering how.
Phronēsis and the Tragic Insight
Kirkland argues that Aristotle’s ethics incorporates the tragic insight of his Poetics because it is “an ethic of finitude, grounded in a peculiar and original intellectual virtue that is tailor-made for inhabiting this fraught, temporally excessive, and tragic condition. That virtue is phronêsis” (189).
Aristotle describes what phronêsis, the intellectual virtue for action, allows the prudential agent to do: “To feel such things when we should, though, about the things we should, in relation to the people we should, for the sake of what we should, and as we should is a mean and best and precisely what is characteristic of virtue” (1107a20-3). Having argued against tragedy as provoking a feeling, Kirkland nonetheless finds tragedy to provoke learning about the human condition in a sense of contemplation. But I want to note that the practical wisdom that makes us know how to act makes us feel in certain ways. So the circle seems to be from tragedy provoking our learning about human action by depicting suffering in a way that leads us to contemplate the being of the human to practical wisdom cultivating our capacity to feel the right things in such a way that leads us to act.
“That is, the best tragedy, in bringing about by means of fear and pity the cathartic illumination of the temporal excess of our human praxis, also leaves us wondering and stricken with awe. What we ‘learn’ about praxis, then, is not how to engage in it more successfully, so much as that there is something inescapably perplexing and troubling at its very heart” (185-6). How does the learning of its perplexity makes us more ethical? Aristotle insists that virtuous action is more than knowing things about being human and being ethical, we have to be habituated to act and to feel in the precisely virtuous way. Is the perplexity something like a trigger to consider the moment as a genuinely ethical moment? I don’t think Kirkland takes tragedy to be achieving perplexity about any particular ethical situation, though, which suggests the perplexity involves a way of being comported to the world. If so, then it seems like there is some understanding of our lack of knowledge that is meant to contribute to our deliberations, which suggests we are better able to determine the precise action when we are aware of the limits of our ethical knowledge. I take this as a question about the extent to which the line from Socrates to Aristotle can be maintained.
For Kirkland, the ceaselessly futural nature of the good in human praxis makes ethics as a study imprecise (225). Instead of seeing in the bulls’ eye the precision and particular knowledge involved in ethical life, Kirkland sees it as showing that the good is always at a distance. Aristotle describes the study as something we can only hit more upon, mallon…tunchanein. Kirkland concludes that this means that each ethical judgment and action comes about only by chance (226). I am not convinced that the need to be imprecise and to speak in outline about ethical action means that phronēsis and ethical judgment is imprecise, rather than the ability to speak of it would be. Phronēsis is precise, but the imprecision comes because no universal principle can be given for it because it is dependent on the moment. I wonder further about the insistence on the futurality as what marks the imprecision of the outline rather than the singularity of the ethical moment, which still nonetheless requires precise phronetic judgment – the bulls’ eye (EN II.1) is nothing if not an image of precision.
Kirkland reads the kairos as not capable of being judged with precision because, insofar as praxis is fueled by desire, it aims to bring about a result in the future (VI.2.1139a21-32). He takes this passage to mean that ethical knowledge is imprecise. Is phronêsis not knowledge because it is indeterminate or is it indeterminate because ethical life is singular, and yet still knowledge, a way of knowing, of disclosing the world, even if it is not cognition of universal principles as epistêmê is? Kirkland rightly challenges C.D.C. Reeve’s treatment of phronêsis as something like regulative ideals, but that does not, in my mind, render it as other than knowledge or imprecise. One looks to the kairos, which Kirkland articulates in Aristotle as the good manifesting itself in time (EN 1096a27)because the ethical situation is singular and this singularity is why ethical judgment cannot be a matter of applying a universal rule.
Kirkland still looks for general principles of ethical life when he writes, “Thus, we must ask, what is the precise status of the general principles to which ethical judgment has access via character, even ideally, if these are explicitly not the timeless absolutes grasped through scientific knowledge?” (228). Yet Kirkland suggests that phronêsis does not grasp universals, which I think but I’m not sure, he thinks renders it non-epistemic when he writes, “If phronêsis properly entails no recourse to scientifically grasped ethical universals, then precisely what kind of dunamis is it? From what non-epistemic source would it derive its unique enabling power in ethical action?” (229). Does “non-epistemic” mean not epistēmē, but another form of knowledge, or that Aristotle’s ethics are not rooted in knowledge? Surely for Aristotle practical wisdom is a way of being related to the truth of action that is singular.
I would hold that because ethical judgment requires particular knowledge at any moment, phronêsis itself is not knowledge in outline, though the subject matter that comprises the Nicomachean Ethics might be. Kirkland rightly observes, “The subject matter is then characterized by the fact that, in each practical situation where virtue is at issue, where the question of the good deed arises, there is no fixed, stable, perfectly graspable measure, and thus no reliable technê or ‘skill’ one can simply employ, nor any articulated paraggelia or ‘moral rule’ or ‘law’ that one might apply and allow to determine one’s course of action. Rather than either of these, Aristotle suggests rather that one must always skopein or ‘look’ toward what is suited to the kairos.” 230. Nonetheless, knowledge can be of particulars for Aristotle both in the sense that actual knowledge is of particulars in Metaphysics M.10 (1086b37-1087a25) and in the sense that ethical situations are singular and require singular knowledge. Perhaps Kirkland acknowledges as much when toward the end he describes phronêsis as “the perception of particular possible actions as good or choiceworthy,” which he counterposes to Reeve’s view as universal (239).
Kirkland interestingly shifts the sense of the ethical role of tragedy away from a tragic ethics. Tragic ethics capture the impossibility of satisfying all virtuous demands. Plato resolves the problem of conflicting virtues by understanding virtue as knowledge. To have virtuous wisdom in one area of virtue would be to have such wisdom in each area of virtue, since the vicious opposite of each virtue would be ignorance, and one could not be wise and ignorant at once. Aristotle does not think knowledge alone makes one virtuous so this cannot be his answer. Aristotle resolves the problem of potential conflict in tragic ethics with his account of phronêsis, practical wisdom,and the ethical perception it enables by allowing us to see in each situation how to hit the bulls’ eye, how to navigate the conflicting responsibilities and find a way to act in the way that captures all the moral responsibilities to which one is subject. I understand the measure to be the phronimos, who in perceiving what precisely the situation requires avoids tragedy by seeing what action would constitute the aim or telos (EN V.1138b22-3).
To Kirkland, the tragedy of the human is not as tragic ethics would have it, that ethical commitments, beneficence and justice, for example, are prone to be in conflict,[3] it is the tragedy of the finitude of being in time, not having control of the past or knowledge of the future.[4] Might we say that Kirkland shows how tragedy helps us avoid tragic ethics?
[1] Jamelle Bouie, “Just Before I Came Outside…” Facebook, December 9, 2025, 3:56 PM https://www.facebook.com/share/v/14TyBt94BaP/
[2] A. W. Nightingale. Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in its Cultural Context. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
[3] Buss, Sarah. Moral Theorizing and the Limits of Coherence. Vol. 13. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023, pp. 99-125.
[4] Kirkland states, “Aristotle states dramatically, ‘the future is inapparent in us’” (EN I.1101a19). Whether Aristotle makes this claim dramatically is up for debate. I would describe this passage as one of reflection and inquiry in a passage full of hedging language, beginning around 1101a5 with the discussion of Priam. The sentence before articulates Aristotle’s account of happiness from I.7, that we should call happy the person who is active in accord with virtue. Here Aristotle wonders if anything prevents us from calling that person eudemonic who lives the life that underlies Aristotle’s ethical project – activity in accord with becoming excellent as following reason, and he supposes that we would have to take seriously that there could be limits because we don’t know the future. But to read the future’s uncertainty as undermining the earlier account of eudaimonia would give what happens in the future more of a claim over what counts as eudaminoia then living in a way that is oriented toward concern for fulfilling one’s function. The passage is far from conclusive and dramatic. Aristotle certainly does allow, as I take Kirkland to suggest here, that the future and thus our eudaimonic character is not wholly realized.
The Trott Line 