Indecisitivity:

An Aristotelian Primer on Making the Wrong Decision

C.J. Sentell
Choice plays a central role in our thinking about ethics. In fact, the concept of choice may be
the central concept in our ethical lexicon. Through the experience of choice, our decisions
and actions gain ethical traction so as to make possible other ethical concepts such as duty,
responsibility, right, and obligation. And to the extent that we experience choices to be at
work in the world through our actions and their consequences, we are able to articulate
explicitly normative judgments of good and bad, right and wrong, or, as we have come with
good reason to say more frequently, ethical and unethical. In this way, our choices put us to
work in the world in certain ways, and this work and its consequences constitute the proper
scope and subject matter of ethics. One could also say, negatively, that without the concept
of choice, the concept of ethics would not make sense. Without the type of freedom entailed
by the concept of choice, there would be no justification for holding people accountable for
their actions just as there would be no reason to make a normative judgment in the first place.
In short, if there is no choice, then there is no situation to which ethical judgment is proper;
choice, in this way, is the sine qua non of ethics.
But lurking directly behind this conception of ethics is what we (post-)moderns have
come to call “the subject,” whose will constitutes the source of the autonomy of choice and
whose actions constitute the sole object of ethical judgment. Through the will, which is the
seat of this individual autonomy, the subject carves out a space for freedom in a world
otherwise largely determined. For us, ethics has come to be almost completely focused on
this individual subject, and it is through the subjective phenomenological language of choice,
will, and freedom that we have traditionally come to speak of ethics. According to this story,
only the subject can be ethical, and all ethical judgments must continually return to this
subject in order to find the ground necessary for choice and action. This is all just to
articulate something of a truism, namely, that ethics has come to be almost wholly concerned
with the individual subject and the actions that emanate from that subject. Ethics, in this
way, has become unidirectional in its focus on the subject, and univocal in its declaration of
the right and wrong of this individual’s choices after the action has taken place.
Of late, however, philosophers of various stripes have urged us (some rather strongly)
to reconsider this subject. Indeed, some have even pronounced this to be the era of the
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“death of the subject.” In different ways, and through different traditions, these thinkers have
taken as their task to deconstruct this subject, to uncover its archeological history amid social
institutions of practice and production, and to trace its contemporary instantiations through
various genealogies of political power and violence. They have sought to show the various
ways in which the autonomous subject – that great accomplishment of modernity – is a
construction from concepts so disparate that it is no longer adequate or accurate to speak of
the subject as a discrete, isolable entity. By disaggregating this subject, by tracing its
functions through lineages of historical and philosophical discourse, these thinkers have
argued for disunity over unity, heterogeneity over homogeneity, and discontinuity over
continuity when it comes to thinking and speaking about the subject. The subject, in other
words, is precisely not the atomistic “I” that thinks and therefore is; it is much more complex
and much less cut and dry than we have been in the habit of thinking. And if this critique of
the subject is at least partly legitimate, then it has profound implications in terms of our
ability to formulate cogent, viable, and productive conceptions of the possibilities for ethical
life in the future.
Rather than an ethics grounded in this autonomous individual – a possibility that,
again, is now so thoroughly complicated as to seem closed off to us as a live possibility for
consideration – we need an ethics based within the ongoing experience of relations. In this
way, relations and relationships, instead of individuals, become the smallest units of ethical
analysis. These relations, moreover, must find their only means of expression within
experience. Instead of an ethics based upon a set of static principles solely concerned with
individuals, their choices, and the post hoc judgments about the actions resulting from those
choices, ethics would be transformed into an open-ended inquiry that is grounded in
experience and concerned, above all, to discern the relations obtaining in between individuals
and things, and the actions that are called for within those relations based on the projected
and actual consequences of those actions. The obvious difficulty, however, is that the
concept of experience is now so totally saturated with the concepts and language of
subjectivity that the aforementioned critique of the subject stands to thwart any such attempt
before it ever gets started.
In our search for a conception of experience prior to the subject, for a conception of
experience that is outside of or independent from modern subjectivity, we can do no better
than return to Aristotle. In what has been transmitted to us as his corpus of philosophical
writings – which is, of course, precisely what they are not, namely, a coherent body of
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writings by a singular author, which is itself a concept based within modern subjectivity –
there is no subjectivity prior to experience, nor is there a subject that encounters the world as
a world of objects. Rather, what we are confronted by in “Aristotle’s works” is a mind in
motion exploring the meaning of the world in terms of experience, without the limitations
and dualisms of language and concepts, objectivity and subjectivity. Aristotle does not seek
to terminate the myriad meanings found within experience, but to capture them in their
difference and to maintain that difference precisely for the sake of inquiry.
In the texts we possess under the proper name “Aristotle,” we are able to stand
witness to the unfolding of thought in time and become actual participants in the best type of
traditional or historical thinking, a type of thinking that seeks to integrate what has come
before into a dialectic of clarification in and for the present. Aristotle’s philosophy is, in
short, a philosophy of experience not predicated upon the subject or on modern notions of
subjectivity. There is, in fact, no Greek word that is translatable into the modern concept of
“subject”. Rather, there is only the hupokeimenon, which is often translated as “subject,” but
whose meaning is more accurately rendered as the underlying substance that undergoes
change and upon which attributes are predicated.1 So it seems that if we make a concerted
effort to set aside the various ways in which Aristotle has been appropriated within and
through various traditions, and for oftentimes quite different ends, what we get is a type of
radical empiricism (though, strictly speaking, that appellation is surely anachronistic) and a
conception of experience that is not mediated by the subject and its concomitant subjectivity.
This is all to say that even without “the subject” the concepts of choice and action
still matter. Choices and actions seem to remain effective in the world, regardless of their
dependency on a unified metaphysical subject. And to the extent that we experience our
choices as causes of action, the question remains as to how we should act and how we should
comport ourselves in a world where our actions appear to be always already at work. To put
it another way, I do not think that asking the question of whether choice or decision really
exists, as such, is a fruitful line of inquiry. Nor do I think that asking the “deeper” question
as to whether freedom of the will exists, as such, is a well-formulated question. Rather, I
would like account for choice and action, as well as decision and freedom, as we experience
it when we are at work in the world in actual relations with others.

1
Moreover, neither is there a precise correlate in Greek to our word “object,” but I neither have the time
nor the Greek to deal with that here.
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In this essay, I will outline Aristotle’s account of choice with the intent to begin to
formulate an ethics after the subject. I will do so, moreover, within the framework of the
question as to whether or not it is possible, in the strong sense, to make a wrong decision.
Surely, particular choices can be thought of in terms of good and bad, but is it possible to
attribute a stronger normative judgment to certain decisions that are recognized in retrospect
as having affected one’s life in a wholly negative way, in a way that changes the course of
one’s life so as to radically exclude happiness or the potential for becoming the person one
desires to become? By changing the word to wrong, I am not attempting to inject any higher
sort of morality into the judgment of the decision, which would be asinine, but am trying
rather to connote a larger consequential scope for any particular decision. We casually say
that “it’s not that big of choice” when contemplating the options for dinner on a particular
evening, or choosing what type of coffee to have at the café. But there are also choices that
do seem to have a larger impact on the direction one’s life takes, for example, which job offer
to accept or when to end a significant relationship with someone. After such decisions, it
seems, one’s life changes course for better or worse. Thus scope of decisions can vary from
small to large, and by asking whether a decision can be wrong I am asking whether it is
possible to make a bad decision whose scope is large. From Voltaire to Nietzsche to
Kundera, this question has been highly provocative when considering the nature of choice
and action, and this is the specific question I would like to think with Aristotle in this essay.
***
One possible starting point for formulating an ethical comportment independent of modern
subjectivity is to discuss the way in which Aristotle understands human beings to be a part of
the natural world. In fact, one of the overarching concerns of Aristotle’s thought is phusis,
which is translated variously as “nature,” or “the regular order of nature,” or “nature as an
originating power.” Physics, in its contemporary usage, obviously derives from phusis, but
in the Greek it has a wider meaning that might be more appropriately rendered as the “study
of nature,” with the physicist being “the one who studies nature.” For Aristotle, nothing is
outside of phusis and therefore nothing is outside of nature. All of Aristotle’s inquiries, in
other words, are physical inquiries or inquiries into the phusis of a particular subject matter.
In this way, for example, the work we have today under the title On the Soul is
properly understood as an inquiry into the phusis of the soul, or psuchê, while that of the
Nicomachean Ethics is properly understood as an inquiry into the specifically human psuchê.
Ethics, then, is a form of physics, and must be studied as such, but with the important caveat
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that different forms of inquiry call for different methods of analysis and standards of
precision. Aristotle points out that “it belongs to an educated person to look for just so much
precision in each kind of discourse as the nature of the thing one is concerned with admits;
for to demand demonstrations from a rhetorician seems about like accepting probable
conclusions from a mathematician” (1094b 24). So even if ethics is a form of physical
inquiry, it must be addressed with the level of precision appropriate to its subject matter,
which, for Aristotle, is only “roughly and in outline” (1094b 19). Ethics can only be
sketched out in this way because it is an inquiry into the experience of relations. The inquiry
that is ethics, then, is an inquiry that must be always underway, and can never be completed
as a set of written, pre-determined principles that function as a static calculus into which
particular actions are placed in order to determine their normative status.
Within the framework of phusis, however, Aristotle makes a further distinction
between those things that are by nature and those things that are not by nature. For Aristotle,
to say that something is by nature is to say that it is necessary; things that are by nature
cannot be otherwise. Man, for example, is by nature a political animal, which is to say that
man necessarily lives within a polis (1253a 3). Ethical virtue, however, is not by nature. “It
is clear,” Aristotle says, “that none of the virtues of character comes to be present in us by
nature, since none of the things that are by nature can be habituated to be otherwise” (1103a
20). At this point, one may likely suppose that the opposite of this by nature necessity is
some type of freedom from that necessity, that ethical virtue is freedom from natural
necessity. But this is to miss the crucial Aristotelian distinction between contradictories and
contraries. For Aristotle, freedom and necessity are not contradictions; rather, the contrary of
the necessary is the possible, while the contradiction of the necessary is the impossible. So
the distinction between the things that are by nature and the things that are not by nature is a
distinction of contraries. Thus, we should understand necessity to be that which is always
and freedom to be that which is possible. And, moreover, the necessary always precedes the
possible; it is a natural determination (which is not the same as being determined) upon
which the possible is strictly reliant. So there is no freedom without nature; the limits of the
possible are always consequent upon the determinations of the natural. What is possible, in
other words, is always with respect to what is actual; what can be is strictly dependent upon
what is. In this way, there is only freedom within natural necessity.
Thus to say that ethical virtue is not by nature is not to say that it is contradictory to
nature, which would be to say that it is impossible, but rather is to say that ethical virtue is
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not by necessity. That ethical virtue is not by nature means simply that such virtue is
possible because we are creatures that have such a capacity, and that that virtue comes into
being as a consequence of convention, upbringing, and habituation (1103a 15). For Aristotle,
we are already the type of beings in which ethical virtues can take hold – again, that
possibility must be able to be predicated of what we are in order for it to be a possibility in
the first place – and we must actively bring those virtues into being through our actions and
choices. As Aristotle says, “the virtues come to be present neither by nature nor contrary to
nature, but in us who are of such a nature as to take them on, and to be brought to completion
in them by means of habit” (1103a 27). Thus it is habit, or hexis, that brings the possibility of
virtue into actuality.
In this way, Aristotelian habits are states of activity that realize our potential for
virtue, and “it makes no small difference, then, to be habituated in this way or in that straight
from childhood, but an enormous difference, or rather all the difference” (1103b 26). And
through these states of activity, which we begin to form straight from birth, that virtue is
enhanced or diminished. Aristotelian virtue, then, “grows by the action of those things out of
which it comes into being, or is destroyed by them when they do not happen in the same way,
and that it is at work in connection with those things out of which it has come into being”
(1105a 15). Thus, one does not choose one’s habit, strictly speaking, but one undergoes
them. Habits affect a certain comportment to the world by initiating an activity that is
reinforced or denigrated through repetition according to a particular end. Habits, as states of
activity, or being-at-work in the world, are absolutely central to Aristotle’s ethics precisely
because one can be virtuous only through action. So rather than virtue being a certain set of
correct principles or beliefs possessed, and therefore being a characteristic attributable to the
individual holding them, virtue is found only in doing virtuous things. Aristotle says, for
example, that “we become just by doing things that are just, temperate by doing things that
are temperate, and courageous by doing things that are courageous” (1103b 1). In this way,
virtue is possible only through an active comportment to the world, and is actual only by
doing virtuous things according to sound habits.
Aristotle differentiates choice from those activities to which it is related but is not the
same. He begins with wishing. Wishing, for Aristotle, is always concerned with a particular
end, while choice properly concerns the means related to that end (1111b 25). For example,
“we wish to be healthy, but we choose those things by means of which we will become
healthy, and we wish to be happy and say so, while it would not fit the meaning to say we
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choose to be happy, since, universally, choice seems to be concerned with things that are up
to us” (1111b 26). So a wish is a desire for an end, while choice is concerned with those
things which will bring about the end. On the whole, then, choice is about those things that
are up to us. We can wish all we want, but if there are no means available to bring about that
wish, then there is nothing to choose.
Next Aristotle turns to opinion, which is also different from choice. Opinion is
distinguished from choice in that one can have opinions about anything, while choice, again,
is concerned with those things toward which we can have an affective comportment. He says
that choice “could not be opinion either, since there seems to be opinion about all things, and
no less about things that are everlasting or things that are impossible than about things that
are up to us; and opinion is divided into the false and the true, not into the bad and the good,
while choice instead is divided into the latter two kinds” (1111b 32). So one can have
opinions about anything, including the impossible, which is contradictory to nature, and the
everlasting, which is the proper realm of knowledge. But, again, one can have a choice only
about those things that are within our purview of control and action. Aristotle goes on to say
that now “no doubt no one even claims that choice is the same as opinion as a whole, but it is
not even the same as some particular opinion, for by choosing good or bad things we are
certain kinds of people, but not by having opinions.” (1112a 4). So it is through choice
alone that we are and can become good and bad people.
The concept of choice, then, is dependent upon a certain conception of freedom, a
conception that centers around those things that we are able to alter through our being-at-
work in the world. Certainly we would deny someone the use of the term “choice” if, say,
they did not act freely, or if a choice was made for them and without their input. Thus,
freedom from force is a necessary condition for speaking accurately of choice. Now,
obviously, force is term of art within phusis proper, and it is no coincidence that Aristotle
discusses choice in terms of force or the privation of force, for again ethics just is the phusis
of the human psuchê. And just as when we were inquiring into motion caused by forces both
within and outside of natural bodies, in ethics, too, “it appears that what is forced is that of
which the source is from outside, while the one who is forced contributes nothing” (1110b
15). The language Aristotle employs here, namely, that of inside-outside, with force being
defined as outside the one who acts, is key to understanding the way in which the natural
body is an appropriate and acceptable limit in speaking about choice, action, motion, and
force. To choose is to move oneself; choice is a certain type of locomotion. The source of
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action must be internal to the organism moved in order for the action to be considered
properly chosen. This organism is putatively taken to be separable from the surrounding
milieu by its own corporeal limits, by its self-enclosing flesh. This limit is accepted as a limit
within the inquiry because it is a commonly held belief, or doxa, which always form the
starting points of Aristotle’s inquiries.2
But before taking up choice specifically, Aristotle sets out to examine the role
ignorance plays within the realm of choice, as well as the difference between willing and
unwilling acts.3 Now, naturally, actions accomplished out of ignorance are never willing acts
(1110b 18). But there seems to be a difference, Aristotle notes, between acting on account of
ignorance and acting while being ignorant (1110b 27). The former is the type of ignorance
that is excludes certain actions from choice because it is an “ignorance of the particulars in
which the action occurs and with which it is concerned,” while the latter is dependent upon a
certain type of depravity for which we have pity and forgiveness (1111a 1). Moreover,
Aristotle claims that “one has to say what is willing or unwilling at the time when someone
does it; and one does things of this sort willingly, for the source of the moving of the parts
that are instrumental in such actions is in oneself, and anything of which the source is in
oneself is also up to oneself either to do or not” (1110a 15). In other words, the
determination of whether or not a choice is properly called a choice turns on the question of
whether or not it was done willfully, which, importantly, is oftentimes of a mixed character
(1110a 13). So, choice is only choice if it is done willfully or freely, and such a
determination can only be made at the time the choice is accomplished. Thus, there are two
crucial criterion by which choices are identified, namely, through the conditions that
accompany the choice (i.e., willingly or unwillingly, or, not by force or by force) and the
temporal parameters established by the choice (i.e., the moment the choice is made).

2
Unless this corporeal limit is found to be lacking in some specific way, and I think we can find such a lack
eventually, this limit stands as a starting point for inquiry. For example, we could identify various ways in
which force acts without us recognizing it as force, or how the determinations of certain situations obviate
or dictate certain choices as necessary within that framework. But in order to complicate the notion of the
body as a limit, we would need to incorporate serious historical and sociological analyses of particular
networks of force and influence. For now, let this stand as a marker to which I can return. But I do want to
point out that the body and the subject are neither identical nor co-extensive. We can jettison the subject
and its subjectivity without jettisoning the body as a useful marker within ethical inquiry. Aristotle’s
hupokeimenon is not the modern subject, but it is a corporeal unity upon which predicates can be attributed
and that undergoes change via generation and destruction.
3
But, again, we must proceed with caution here because the will Aristotle has in mind is quite different
from the will that has been handed down to us through the Christian and modern traditions, traditions in
which the will plays a primary role in the constitution of the subject.
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After making this distinction, Aristotle turns directly to choice, which he claims “to
be what belongs most properly to virtue and to determine one’s character more than one’s
actions do” (1111b 5). Thus even more than acting, it is choice that exemplifies virtuous
character. “Choice,” Aristotle claims, “is obviously something willing, but they are not the
same thing, as what is willing covers a wider range, since children and other animals share in
willing acts but not in choice, and we speak of things done on the spur of the moment as
willing acts, but not as things done as a result of choice” (1111b 7). In this way, the
connection between choice and willful action becomes clear: even though children and
animals can do things willfully, they cannot choose; and just as spontaneous actions are
considered willful, they cannot be considered chosen. So choice “is obviously something
willing, but not everything that is willing is something chosen,” and this is because “choice is
involved with reason and thinking things through” (1112a 15).
In fact, the Greek word translated as choice is proairesis, which means desire
informed by deliberation or thinking infused with desire (1139b 4). This activity, moreover,
is an activity of the entire human being where neither the rational nor the arational aspects of
our nature are dominant. Without the prefix pro, the word would mean to select things from
a given array based solely on desire, much in the way an animal or child would. But by
adding pro to airesis, Aristotle emphasizes the way in which thought must be combined with
the desired selection, prior to the action of selection, for it to be properly called a choice.
Choice, then, requires deliberation; it requires time and thought prior to action. The temporal
priority of choice to action is why the former matters more than the latter in terms of virtue:
choice picks out and goes over the possibilities in a given situation, and this process is more
central to virtue because it determines the parameters and means by which one can act at all.
Choice is central to virtue because the virtues are actually “certain kinds of choices, or not
present without choice” (1106a 3). Virtues are certain kinds of choices through the
habituation of right desire, sound understanding, and effective action. Thus, Aristotle defines
virtue as “an active condition that makes one apt at choosing, consisting in a mean condition
in relation to us, which is determined by a proportion and by the means by which a person
with practical judgment would determine it” (1107a 1).
Aristotle attributes a separate name to this power a person with practical judgment
has for such deliberative choice, namely, phronesis. For Aristotle, phronesis is a “truth-
disclosing active condition involving reason about human goods that governs action” (1140b
21). Phronesis is differentiated from the other truth-disclosive powers of the soul – techne,
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episteme, noûs, and sophia – in that its proper concern is with action, or praxis, directed
toward human goods (1141b 21). Such a concern, moreover, remains focused on the
particular (1110b 8), or the ultimate singular attained through perception (1109b 24), which
is always the basis upon which action is taken (1142a 8). Praxis is never general, but is
always radically particular. Nor is praxis merely the application of theoretical knowledge;
like so many other things, for Aristotle the two are each aspects of the other within our active
comportment to the world.
Phronesis, then, is praxis regulated by thought toward a singular human end (1140b
5), and it functions as the bridge between the two types of virtues of the psuchê, namely,
those that belong to character and those that belong to thinking (1139a 1), and coordinates
between the three things in the psuchê that govern action and truth, namely, sense-perception,
intellect, and desire (1139a 18). Of these, Aristotle argues that “what affirming and denying
are in thinking, pursuing and avoiding are in desiring, so that, since virtue of character is an
active condition of the soul that determines choice, while choice is deliberate desire, for these
reasons the rational understanding must be true and the desire right if the choice is of serious
worth, and what the one affirms, the other pursues” (1139a 20). Phronesis, then, is precisely
this power to coordinate desire and understanding; it is a direction of desire for the sake of
some end. “Thinking itself moves nothing,” Aristotle declares, “but thinking that is for the
sake of something and pertains to action does cause motion” (1139a 38). The motion that is
good action, or, more simply, acting well, just is the end toward which right desire aims
(1140b 7). “For this reason,” Aristotle says, “choice is either intellect fused with desire or
desire fused with thinking, and such a source is a human being” (1139b 5). Thus, phronesis
is the power to coordinate desire and reason in the activity of choice, which is itself a type of
motion whose source is the human being.
We are now in a position to understand the respects in which choice is a form of
deliberation. On the one hand, deliberation and choice concern those things which can be
otherwise (1141b 11). Just as one cannot choose among those things that are necessary or
impossible, neither can one deliberate about them; one can inquire into such things, but one
cannot deliberate about them. This is because inquiry and deliberation are distinct: all
deliberation is inquiry, but not all inquiry is deliberation (1142a 32). Thus, to be within the
realm of choice is to be within the realm of deliberation, because both concern the
possibilities available within a given human situation. Deliberation is a type of inquiry into
the possible means by which a particular end can be achieved. To choose is to deliberate,
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and one deliberates only about means, not ends. For Aristotle, the end is good action itself
(1140b 7), which limits the subject of deliberation to the means by which such an action can
be realized. As a form of inquiry, then, deliberation is a process of identifying the
possibilities for action available within a given situation.
On the other hand, and as I mentioned earlier, there is also a temporal dimension to
choice and deliberation. Deliberation is a dialectical exploration whose aim is to identify the
best possible means to a particular end. These possible means just are the choices available
in a given situation. But the identification of such means necessarily takes time.
Accordingly, Aristotle points out that “people deliberate for a long time, and say that one
ought to be quick to do what has been deliberated, but to deliberate slowly” (1142b 4). In
this way, the choices that the deliberative process identifies as possible within a given
situation do not simply appear in the immediacy of the situation. On the contrary. To
identify fully all the choices available to one within a situation, one much engage in a
thorough exploration of that situation that seeks not only to identify the possible means by
which a given end can be reached, but also to identify each relation within the situation and
the potential consequences that may result from choosing one course of action over the other.
In this way, deliberation takes time; it is not immediate, but mediate. Deliberation is the
mediation of action by thought. Deliberation is a process of inquiry, and all processes are
things of time. To be in process is to be in time, and to be in time is to be in motion. Strictly
speaking, then, deliberation is not action; it is not itself a type of motion, but rather a
movement of thought that prepares the way for the motion of action.
In this way, there is always a certain urgency to choice: we must choose slowly, but
be quick to act on what is chosen. The quickness of this action is the urgency of choice,
which can vary widely, but is always present. This is because the situation in which choice is
active, strictly speaking, calls for action. Choice is prior to the course of action in that it
demands a course be chosen within a discrete frame of time so as to be effective. The
situation that calls for a choice to be made, in other words, is, by definition, indeterminate.
This indeterminacy rests within the futurity of the situation, on the potential of the situation
to become actual in a particular way.
At this point, I would like to introduce a third term, namely decision, which Aristotle
does not explicitly discuss, but which I would like to introduce into this discussion and define
along Aristotelian lines. If choice is the activity of deliberation that considers the various
possibilities for action available within a given situation, then decision is the closing off of
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that activity so as to in fact act. Decision, in this way, is the conclusion of deliberation; it
marks the end of choice by realizing that choice in action. Through deliberation, the
possibilities for action are identified as choices. Through decision, the possibilities for action
are chosen and put to work in the world. Through action, choices are made manifest by
decision. While decisions realize choices, actions realize decisions. When one decides, one
chooses to act in a certain way. When a decision is made, the possibilities of choice are
closed off so as to make way for action. In this way, decision can be seen as the keystone
joining choice and action. It is the middle term between choice and action, similar in
structure to and guided by the power of phronesis. None of these three concepts can be
thought in isolation, as each are dependent on the other for their respective meanings.
Decision is the coupling of choice and action; it is the realization of deliberation through
action, of which choice is the source.
To capture the three-fold structure of this concept, I would like to propose the word
decisitivity, which simply means the activity of decision. No doubt an ugly word, it remains
entirely accurate. Because a decision is the activity of choice, of making choice active and
operative in the world, it is properly a motion. A decision is the putting into motion of
choice; it initiates motion and is the source of motion. By putting choice to work in the
world, decision brings a certain set of possibilities into actuality and transforms the
indeterminate situation into a determinate one. The failure of this activity of decision, in
turn, is indecisitivity. And I would like to now argue that this failure of the activity of
decision, or indecisitivity, is a failure that allows us to think of a decision as being a wrong
decision, rather than merely a bad one. To accomplish this, we must return to thinking about
ethics more explicitly in terms of a phusis of the human psuchê. More specifically, we must
think again about the ways in which choice is dependent upon the determinate possibilities of
matter, how deliberation is a temporal activity, and how decision is a matter of motion.
***
As we have seen, choices just are the discrete possibilities for action within a situation whose
limits are established by the process of deliberation. Deliberation explores the various
determinations of a given situation and identifies the possible choices of action available
within it. As a singular process, deliberation identifies the multiple choices available for
action. Thus, choice is precisely not the whimsical selection of the any course of action we
may happen to desire; rather, “we have the ability to do what we choose to do by using what
is possible” (101b 7). In this way, choice is always circumscribed by the possibilities of the
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one who experiences choice within the experience of a given situation. This situation, of
course, always consists of other bodies – in motion and at rest – that are affected by our
various decisions. Together, this matrix of bodies and possibilities comprises the relation on
behalf of which we act in certain ways rather than others.
For Aristotle, matter is always already in a particular, determinate form (194b 8).
This form, in turn, delimits the possibilities for becoming available to each form of matter.
Potentiality, in other words, is defined through the determinations already present in the
given situation. In this way, the number of choices available within a given situation
necessarily proceeds from a determinate set of actualities. Because the activity of decision,
or decisitivity, actualizes a certain set of possibilities, it necessarily closes off certain others.
In this way, every decision is both an opening and a closing of determinate possibilities;
every decision establishes a new situation predicated upon that which came before and
oriented toward that which will become precisely on this basis. When we say that someone
has made a good decision, what we mean is that they chose a course of action that opened up
future possibilities in a beautiful, advantageous, or pleasant way (1104b 31). Decisions are
ethical to the extent that they open up such possibilities for the whole of the affected relation,
and are unethical to the extent that they fail to open up such possibilities and actually obviate
them coming into being. Moreover, because the activity of decision, or decisitivity, is a
motion that actualizes certain possibilities within a given situation, it makes determinate a
situation that was theretofore indeterminate, and this motion is always circumscribed by the
temporal parameters of priority and posteriority.
Because our bodies are magnitudes set into motion through the activity of decision,
or decisitivity, it is now appropriate to discuss the role time plays within choice proper, as
well as our normative evaluation of that choice with respect to its consequences in action. As
we have seen, through the process of deliberation, choice necessarily involves time.
Deliberation is a temporal process within which the determinate possibilities of action are
identified and evaluated with respect to the ends toward which the action aims. But when a
decision is reached to actualize the result of that deliberation, we set out to act on that
decision, and, in this way, are put into motion.
But we are not in motion because time is in motion. This is a thoroughly modern
conception of time, where time is a container in which motion takes place and functions as a
constitutive feature of subjective experience. Rather, from an Aristotelian point of view, time
is something that belongs to motion, and motion is something that belongs to a magnitude,
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which, in the case of decision, is our body (219a 10). This is because time, motion, and
magnitude are interdependent in their definitions and activities (219b 16). Aristotle says,
“since a thing in motion is moved from something to something else and every magnitude is
continuous, a motion follows a magnitude; for a motion is continuous because a magnitude is
continuous, and time is continuous because a motion is continuous (for the time elapsed is
always thought to be as much as the corresponding motion which took place)” (219a 11).
Time is neither a motion itself – time is not a this – nor is it without motion. Time is not a
series of static moments which, when joined, comprise temporal continuity (219a 1). Rather,
time is known “when we limit a motion by specifying in it a prior and a posterior as its limits;
and it is then that we say that time has elapsed, that is, when we perceive the prior and
posterior in a motion” (219a 22). In this way, the prior and the posterior serve as limits in
which time, motion, and magnitude come into relief. These limits of priority and posteriority
are moments, which are not parts of time. Rather, “qua being a limit, a moment is not time
but an attribute…for the limits belong only to that which they are the limits…” (220a 25).
Moments, then, are not parts of time in precisely the same way as a points are not parts of a
line and divisions are not parts of motion (220a 14).
With this in mind, I would like to suggest that decisions are moments in the
Aristotelian sense, and that decisitivity establishes a particular moment as the limit of a
particular motion. When decisions are understood as moments, wherein choices are made to
be active in the world, decisions become the limits of the motion that is, for us, locomotion.
Decisions, then, are moments attributable to the activity of our being at work in the world.
As Aristotle says, “a moment follows a body in locomotion just as time follows a motion, for
it is by the body in locomotion that we know the prior and posterior in that motion…” (219b
24). Because, as magnitudes, we are always in motion, and time follows this motion,
decisions function as the momentary limits of discrete ways of being at work in the world. If
decisions are moments, and moments are limits that facilitate the experience of time elapsing,
then the choices that precede decisions are the possible limits of possible motions.
All of this, moreover, is in accord with what I previously said regarding the way in
which a decision initiates a type of locomotion that functions to close off a set of determinate
possibilities while at the same time opening up others. Our decisions put us into motion, and
since the source of this motion is within us, it is a locomotion. “And a thing in locomotion
follows in a way a point,” Aristotle says, “for a point both maintains the continuity and serves
as a limit of a line, since it is the beginning of one and the end of another line” (220a 10). If
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we replace the instances of the words “point” and “line” with “moment” and “time”, this
passage would read: “And a thing in locomotion follows in a way a moment; for a moment
both maintains the continuity and serves as a limit of time, since it is the beginning of one
and the end of another time.” This is exactly the point I am trying to make, namely, that
decisions, taken as moments, both maintain the continuity of time vis-à-vis our magnitudes in
locomotion and function as the necessary temporal limits that allow us to experience the
priority and posteriority necessary for deliberating about the possibilities for action within the
unfolding determinations of actual situations.
Understanding decisions to be moments, or attributes of time that serve as the source
of locomotion, will now allow us to ask the question of whether it is possible to make a
wrong decision rather than simply a bad one. One criteria (among several others) for making
a bad decision concerns the way in which one can decide on a course of action when they
have not properly deliberated about it. Such decisions can be characterized as is either hasty,
impetuous, or equivocal. A hasty decision is when one did not deliberate enough, and either
failed to consider all the potential courses of action, or simply made a shallow or cursory
exploration of them. An impetuous decision is when one either chooses at random or
chooses based on solely on impulse and desire. An equivocal decision is when one chooses
but does not mean it, when the possibilities are not fully chosen, but are left slightly open as
though one has not made a fully committed choice at the time of decision. Of these, it is the
equivocal decision that gives rise to the feeling that one may have made a wrong decision.
Allow me expand upon this a bit.
An equivocal decision is actually not properly a decision at all. It is, rather, the
semblance of a decision that occurs when one has only tentatively committed to a particular
course of action and, therefore, leaves choice uncoupled from effective action. An equivocal
decision is a failure of active comportment toward the possibilities of choice in the world,
and therefore, for Aristotle, it is also a failure of virtue. It is only to the equivocator, then,
that the question of making a wrong decision can occur; only to them would such a question
make sense precisely because they have failed in the activity of decision and are mired within
indecisitivity. They have failed to properly make a decision in that they have failed to see the
absolute singularity of their choice, and the necessity of that choice precisely because they
are bodies in motion, bodies responding and corresponding to one another in temporal
succession.
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The only way to think you have made a wrong decision, over and above simply a bad
one, is to cling to the possibility of making another choice after a decision has ostensibly
taken place. This, again, is no decision at all, but a failure of decision. It is a failure to take
seriously the fact that decision functions as a temporal limit to choice. In other words, the
feeling of having made a wrong decision stems from failing to come to terms with the way in
which an actual decision constitutes a moment of time. By keeping choice open, by
remaining in a state of pseudo-deliberation, one fails in the activity of being at work in the
world and thereby fails to take account of the way decisions can change the world. And by
failing to close off certain determinate possibilities, by allowing oneself to be consumed with
indecisitivity, one perpetuates the feeling that the decision (not) made was one that could be
otherwise and that, within the possibilities that seem to remain open, one course of action
could adversely affect one’s life in a way that another decision would not. The feeling of
having made a wrong decision is the result of a lack of decisitivity, and the only way to think
such a thing is to be consumed with indecisitivity. Only the equivocator can feel this anxiety,
this existential trembling before choice and action and decision that is the anxiety of
indecisitivity.
Thus, from an Aristotelian perspective, one cannot make a wrong decision as
opposed to simply a bad one, and certainly one can make bad decisions, decisions that are
unethical in their activity toward the others with whom one is in a relation, or are unethical in
their failure to actualize one’s potential in the best possible way. The expanded scope of a
wrong decision could only make sense once motion has ceased and the entire movement held
in one view. Such a perspective is obviously impossible, though it has certainly held great
imaginative power within several philosophical and theological traditions. Einmal ist
keinmal – one time is no time – and the temporal singularity that is decisitivity does not allow
for the question to be raised as to whether a certain decision was the wrong one or not. The
course of decision making is, some would say unfortunately, rather unidirectional. All
decisions are of equal material weight, and each decision realizes certain possibilities while
closing off others. This turns out to be the best of all possible worlds precisely because it is
the actual world, the world of natural determinations delimiting the possible. And it is
precisely in that possibility becoming actual, being chosen and setting a body into motion in a
particular way, that we can locate the beautiful necessity of our becoming with the world in
simultaneous time.
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Bibliographical Note
All of the above citations come from the works that have been handed down to us under the
proper name of “Aristotle”. I have used the Bekker line numbers for all textual citations and
have intentionally excluded the specific reference to the “text” from which they come. That
said, the citations above come from what we now refer to as the Physics, the Topics, the
Politics, On the Soul, and the Nicomachean Ethics. For all of these except the Nicomachean
Ethics I used the translations by Hippocrates G. Apostle, while for the Nicomachean Ethics I
used the translation by Joe Sachs. I did, however, cross reference their translations of this
work for this essay.