Reason and Character is a chapter-by-chapter commentary on the first seven books of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. (Books 8 and 9 are examined in this author’s insightful study of Aristotle’s understanding of friendship.) As such, it displays many of the virtues we expect to find in thoughtful commentaries: a mastery of detail, surprising insights that emerge therefrom, and the exposure of loose ends missed by less careful readings, to name a few. But it also displays some of the limitations that often accompany this way of engaging with texts: a tendency to get lost in the details, disjointed development of continuing arguments, and a reluctance to bring other texts to bear on the difficulties raised as the commentary marches from one chapter to the next. The book will therefore be most appreciated by those teachers, as well as students, of classical philosophy who have reason to struggle through the details of Aristotle’s text.

That said, this commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics certainly does not lack an overarching theme or an understanding of Aristotle’s work that it seeks to share with its readers. Lorraine Pangle proposes that for Aristotle there are “two forms of moral virtue, habit-based and reason-guided” and that the Nicomachean Ethics leads careful readers on a dialectical and rhetorical ascent from the former to the latter. Aristotle, she suggests, is “for many books testing that [habit-based] understanding to show its great strength and also, more quietly, certain weaknesses, preparing for his claims in book 10 that the life of philosophy satisfies better the standard … that has guided the examination of moral virtue” (pp. 10–11). In this reading, Aristotle’s well-known tendency to hem and haw on key points, taking back on one page what he gave on the previous one, is the product of his testing and ultimate rejection of an attractive way of thinking about the human good.

Interpreting Aristotle in this way allows Pangle to reduce the distance between Platonic and Aristotelian approaches to moral philosophy. These differences, proclaimed so loudly by Aristotle himself, come to look more rhetorical than substantive in her presentation. Indeed, at one point (p. 8) she goes so far as to suggest that they might not amount to much more than a division of rhetorical labor: Plato dazzles radical youth into taking the philosophic life seriously, whereas Aristotle brings along their elders with his flattering respect for their age and experience. Substantive differences may remain between the two understandings of moral philosophy in her account, but they seem to get thinner and thinner as the commentary unfolds.

Minimizing the differences between Plato and Aristotle seems an important goal for Pangle, as it does for many scholars inspired by Leo Strauss, whose famous dichotomy between ancient and modern political philosophy would be hard to accept if it turned out that the two greatest ancient political thinkers disagreed on fundamental questions. For others, however, it is bound to seem like a quixotic quest, given how often and vehemently Aristotle draws our attention to those differences. No doubt, we should reject exaggerated images of the distance between Platonic and Aristotelian approaches to philosophy, like those depicted in Raphael’s School of Athens or in the cliché that everyone is born either a Platonist or an Aristotelian. Plato and Aristotle stand on the same side of so many things that divide us from them that they are bound to share all sorts of commonalities, both obvious and subtle, that deserve our attention. But these commonalities are much more evident and salient for us, looking back at them from the other side of all those dividing lines, than they would be to Plato and Aristotle themselves.

Pangle reduces the friction between Platonic and Aristotelian moral philosophies by interpreting the Nicomachean Ethics as a long and subtle preparation for the leap to the Platonic celebration of the philosophic life of contemplation with which she believes that it concludes. She argues that Aristotle’s text builds up an appealing vision of the good life for the older gentlemen that he is addressing, a life grounded in habit-bred moral virtues like courage, justice, and moderation, only to gradually reveal to careful readers that vision’s inadequacies. And a very careful reading is exactly what she offers us, full of interesting details and provocative questioning of familiar premises. But the rhetorical framework that Pangle constructs for Aristotle seems implausible. Aristotle’s sober gentlemen, the decent but relatively unimaginative individuals whom he is leading toward an appreciation of the contemplative life in this interpretation, are the last people in the world to pick up on the kind of textual subtleties with which Aristotle supposedly undermines his explicit celebration of the life of moral virtue. If the Nicomachean Ethics ends, as Pangle suggests, with a celebration of the philosophic life as the highest good for human beings, then that conclusion is bound to come as a shocking surprise to his gentlemanly audience: it is more like the revelation of a completely unexpected murderer in the final pages of a mystery novel than the satisfying conclusion of a Bildungsroman.

But is that how the book ends? With the suggestion that Aristotle is abandoning an understanding of the human good that he has vigorously promoted on most of its pages? If so, then we may need to join Pangle’s speculations about its rhetorical structure—unless we want to revive previous attempts to distinguish the earlier “Platonizing” layers of Aristotle’s works from the later “Aristotelian” layers. If not, however, such speculation may not be required. Pangle, it seems to me, assumes rather than demonstrates that she has identified the correct way to interpret the conclusion of the Nicomachean Ethics. Her commentary on this passage, unlike her commentary on the rest of the book, is cursory and barely engages with the lively debates among scholars about its meaning. It seems pretty clear to me that Aristotle here is laying out the limitations—as well as the virtues—of both understandings of the human good, rather than declaring the philosophic life the victor in a contest between them. The life of contemplation points to an extrahuman, “divine” good that exceeds in value the life of habit-bred moral virtue, but it is a good that is only partially available to mortal, socially dependent creatures such as ourselves. The life of moral virtue develops natural capacities, capacities that could only emerge among political animals, that the philosophic life both depends on and tries to ignore. That may not be the best way of interpreting the enigmatic conclusion to the Nicomachean Ethics. But Pangle would need to show what is wrong with it and other interpretations of the book’s conclusion that “save the phenomena,” Aristotle’s focus on moral character as the foundation of the good life, if she wants to convince more scholars to join her speculations about its rhetorical subtleties.