Aristotle – How to live a good life
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Part of me suspects that may be because Aristotle was likely upper class and therefore already had success and/or wealth. I'm not sure that I think his arguments work for people who are suffering or struggling to get by.
I have actually thought that "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" was aan error, and should have been "life, liberty, and the pursuit of fulfilment"
Suffering certainly does make it harder to be virtuous, but you can interpret that not as disregarding the poor but as giving even more justification for orienting society toward satisfying everyone’s basic needs.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Greek-Philosophical-Terms-Historica...
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Greek-Philosophical-Vocabulary-J-Ur...
I have the second one, which I found useful when studying ancient Greek philosophy in English translation.
There’s very little virtue to be had in enduring insults when living in a palace, and waited on hand and foot by servants, but quite notable to endure insults when living in severe hardship.
While correct, it should be noted that he was only a slave during his youth (freed around the age of 18 when Nero died) and was a slave to the secretary of Nero, in other words had a personal connection to Imperial power.
Here lies Epictetus,
a slave maimed in body,
the ultimate in poverty,
and the favored of the gods.
Isn't it understood that focusing on trying to make yourself happy will actually make you miserable, and in any case "happiness" tends to revert to the mean fairly quickly?
But to get the order right, this presentation needs some background in the Greek terms Aristotle is using. E.g., focus on the first few lines of the Nichomachean Ethics, about all beings having a good for themselves; that pulls in his metaphysics, some logic, and orients you to the argument structure.
(Personally, I'm not fond of the moving images.)
> Are we born with those virtues?
> No.
Well, Aristotle also speaks about "starting points" and claims there's a great weight for "habituation" as much as those "starting points" (your genetics, your talents, your environment growing up). So that's important also to say.
"People like that [with the right upbringing] either already have, or can easily grasp, [the right] principles. If neither of those applies to you... well, Hesiod says it best:
Best of them all is a man
who relies on his own understanding.
how to take good advice when he hears it.
and unwilling to listen to others,
then, sorry, you're pretty much hopeless."
There’s a lot of wisdom in Aristotle even if you don’t accept his entire system.
For example, in his politics he says mechanics are not capable of practicing virtue. An interesting claim!
Well, people often find it very difficult to separate explanations from justifications.
The world is what it is. A factual observation is just that! But I think it would be better said that while practicing mechanics one should not be trying to practice virtue.
A moral position will push out a factually accurate one if you aren't willing to ignore your views when assessing something.
The ancients tended to predicate formally where we predicate materially. When they said 'a mechanic can't practise virtue', they didn't mean every man who is a mechanic, which is what we would mean. They meant every mechanic in so far as he is a mechanic. At least this is the tendency -- I don't know if it applies to this particular case.
In this case, it would mean he can't practise virtue, at least not complete virtue, through being a mechanic, but he could in other areas of his life.
Jacques Maritain's Introduction to Philosophy explains this helpfully.
I can't say that I agree fully with it, but knowing the virtues you want to abide to is a good idea.
https://www.amazon.com/Aristotles-Nicomachean-Ethics-Philoso...
Cool. So, then I just draw the rest of the owl? I have no idea where to begin to develop my character.
> This is best achieved through study and habit.
Probably the most efficient way is to study "good" authors, and to emulate "good" models of virtue. The second section of OP already gives some practical tips:
> A good character can handle emotions properly.
> We do that by finding the right mean between two extremes:
> Courage is the right mean between cowardice and recklessness.
> Temperance is the right mean between gluttony and abstinence.
Different "good" models of virtue will often independently reach similar conclusions: handling of emotions is notoriously valued in Buddhism; avoiding extremes is close to Confucius's doctrine of the mean[0], of which Jesus's "turning the other cheek" could be one practical implementation.
Do what you should do.
Many or most of our choices that matter are that simple, but we work really hard to confuse ourselves, to justify and rationalize the choice we want, because that's what we want.
If our choices are difficult because it really is honestly difficult to tell what the right thing is, then it's not a moral flaw to be mistaken.
Not deceiving yourself about the result is the hard part. That's a psychological problem, not a philosophical problem.
Character is not purely an internal thing, but rather something that is built through your interactions in your environment, especially with people.
A better character is built by doing things that are challenging.
My criticism of Aristotle: Living the golden mean, like a happy person isnt going to help when your country is invaded.
This is my number 1 criticism of Temperance as a virtue. There is a reason we grind in college so hard, there is a reason why at some points in our career we work absurd hours and gain weight/become unhealthy.
Aristotle's golden mean (or Temperance) does not account for this.
"But Wisdom would say that this is acceptable to sacrifice health at points"
Does it? How do you weight these virtues as one better than another? Calling for some perfect Platonic form that answers all these questions correctly is a bit of a cop-out.
Sometimes choice this will result in a feeling of sadness. This is not opposed to 'happiness'/fulfillment/beatitude as Aristotle means it, which is not a feeling.
Also, you don't weigh the virtues against each other. They work in harmony. You weigh one action against another.
An interesting criticism considering Aristotle elevated soldiers at war as a prime example. Greek philosophy was generally done by and for noble men, who were expected to deal with war on a regular basis and often actively participate in it.
> Aristotle's golden mean (or Temperance) does not account for this.
Aristotle gives the example that soldiers should be temperate in their enjoyment of war, not reveling in the bloodshed or pushing farther than they can handle. Work and studies are the same way: regardless of your age the human body has limits that you need to account for. When you're younger you can push past some of the softer limits (stay up late, go without food, etc) but eventually you will hit hard physical limits that, if not respected, will cause irreversible damage and often put you in a worse spot than you started.
> "But Wisdom would say that this is acceptable to sacrifice health at points" Does it? How do you weight these virtues as one better than another?
To directly answer: Aristotle does say Practical Wisdom (or Prudence) is the highest of the cardinal virtues, and that the cardinal virtues of Prudence,Courage,Temperance, and Justice are more important virtues than others.
But that's also sort of the whole point of his ethics, you don't have specific rulings of what to do, you develop the character to make the right decisions for the given circumstance. In this case, you rely on good Practical Wisdom to determine what the moderate amount of work is: a wise person wouldn't slack off at work but also wouldn't work 80 hour weeks at the expense of seeing their family.
> Calling for some perfect Platonic form that answers all these questions correctly is a bit of a cop-out.
You'll have to take that up with his teacher I suppose.
The 5th century BC Greece is a place where dying for your city-state is by all means, the highest honour one can achieve.
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Like a nuclear weapon?
Aristoteles should also have gotten a chicken plucked on the market square ...
> Like a nuclear weapon?
If the device in question sets off uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction, then yes, it is good for its purpose as a nuclear weapon.
You are asking/implying: is the nuclear weapon's purpose good (in the first place)?
Something can be good for its purpose (e.g., electric chair [0]), but the good/badness of that purpose is a separate question.
It is the latter that makes nuking a city a bad deed.
As it is said in the art of war, the good general is the one who wins without having to draw his sword.
So a good nuclear weapon is one that you will never need to use.
This certainly does not seem obvious to me. It seems eminently arguable that the ultimate goal of a weapon is to make someone else do what you want or eliminate them or punish them if they do not. Or the ultimate goal of a weapon is to kill something to eat it. Or other stuff. When the first ape-map picked up the first jaw bone with the intent of bashing in another person's head, I doubt he was thinking "I'm looking forward to keeping this peace with this."
A tragedy of the crudeness of materialism is that it obliterates telos, and in doing so, destroys the only possible objective ground for morality and the good. Married to philosophical liberalism, morality becomes a mystery cult rooted in desire that evades explanation. Yyou cannot square the existence of desires--which can be good or bad, in accord with reason, or deviant or depraved--with a purely materialist universe; even Descartes had to tack on the disembodied ghost of the Cartesian mind to account for all sorts of phenomena. So you end up with an irrational gnosticism as a result.
But the fact of the matter is that even the most mundane varieties of efficient causality presuppose telos, as telos is not the same as conscious intent (which is a particular variety), but fundamentally, the ordering of a cause toward an effect. The only reason efficient causality is intelligible at all is because the relation between cause is ordered toward an effect by virtue of the nature of the thing, and not arbitrarily related. Striking a match predictably results in fire, not nothing, nor the appearance of the Titanic or whatever.
We are seeing an increased, if modest interest in broadly Aristotelian thought (which some refer to as "Neo-Aristotelian"), however. As the materialist dinosaurs pass from this earth, fresh blood is willing to reexamine the nihilistic, dehumanizing, materialist dogmas of the last two or three centuries. It was never the case that materialism overthrew the prior intellectual tradition by discrediting it. Rather, it began with the perilous decision to "start from scratch". Putting aside the dubiousness of the notion, what we can expect from starting from scratch is a repetition of the same errors. There are eerie similarities between modern ideas and the pre-Socratic philosophers, for example, of which Aristotle was very much aware and to which he was responding.
>Telos, or finality, also gives morality its proper and objective ground: what is morally right or wrong follows, ultimately, from one's nature.
I have some intuitive understanding of what telos is and why it matters. If I'm understanding you correctly, morality is defined by outcome, but the "tragedy of the crudeness of materialism" is that we can't know the final outcome of anything. Then what good is knowing about telos anyway?
I'd argue that Scholasticism, that is, the marriage of Middle-Ages Christianity to the truthy-sounding gobbledygook of Aristotle, set the case for the moral authority of the church back a thousand years.
> I'd argue that Scholasticism, that is, the marriage of Middle-Ages Christianity to the truthy-sounding gobbledygook of Aristotle, set the case for the moral authority of the church back a thousand years.
a) maybe the Roman church; I don't think the Eastern Orthodox embraced that. And the Protestants more or less junked it, too.
b) "truthy-sounding" is awful dismissive for something that took Europe by storm when Aristotle was re-discovered. Modern thought has rejected Plato and Aristotle, and especially Post-modern thought, but does Aristotle sound "truthy" because you've bought into modern/post-modernity or because he's poor quality? We might have reject Plato/Aristotle because us moderns are so much more enlightened than the ancients. Or we could have a serious case of hubris. Given that large segments of the West are espousing that gender and even species--previously seen as immutable--are mutable, we're either seriously wrong and headed for disaster, or we've discovered something seriously novel.
c) I'm not an expert on Scholasticsm, but as far as telos goes, the Christian telos for humanity is to become like God--to love each other sacrificially as Christ loved us, and to participate with God in creating/stewarding the material world. It's the most expansive telos I'm aware of, and I don't think I've even properly grasped or expressed it.
b) It is dismissive, because Aristotle's solutions should be dismissed. He and Plato before him are very good at identifying problems, but then they both present quasi-mystical solutions to those problems.
The grandparent talks at length about how materialism (that is, that we are made of matter and therefore have material concerns) completely denies us knowledge about what telos actually is. This might be my scientific instrumentalism showing, but if we postulate some entity X, and then say, because of the nature of the universe, we can never actually determine what X is then why do we care about X? That is, if a person dies before they can (as you say) love others sacrificially, did that person live a bad life? Or was their purpose to die early, to serve as some sort of lesson? How can you know? Can you even know?
That's what I mean when I say "truthy-sounding". It seems to wrap things in a nice neat little box, it certainly sounds profound, until you really look at it and realize, oh no, that didn't solve anything.
I'm not going to rise to the gender bait, but the concept of species is mutable, because speciation occurs on such long timelines that its impossible to point to just one generation and say "cousins from this branch are definitely species A and cousins from that branch are definitely species B". I'm strongly of the mind that "discrete species" is a lie we tell ourselves so we don't have lose too much sleep trying to reconstruct the extended family tree of all life on earth.
Your definition of materialism is not what the term commonly means. Clearly we're made of matter and have material concerns; everybody is a materialist under that definition. Materialism-as-commonly-defined goes much further and says that matter, and therefore material concerns, are all there is. Quite different.
The telos is nothing mythical or hooey. It's utterly anodyne: it's what a thing does, or how a thing acts. The telos of an acorn is to grow into an oak tree. The telos of water (one of them) is to dissolve salt. We know this because if you put salt in water, the water dissolves it; it doesn't turn it into sugar. Dissolving salt is what water does. The fact that we could describe the chemistry of how this happens in far more detail doesn't undermine the point. Nor does the fact that water has more than one telos. And if you say this is trivial, I almost agree with you: it's supposed to be.
Materialism is objectionable (as it pertains to this discussion) because it denies the telos, by saying that everything can be defined in terms of matter, and nothing else. This is a mistake: the telos cannot be reduced to matter. "What a thing does" is not the same as "what a thing is made of". Even if you want to say that the former is entirely caused by the latter -- which I would not entirely disagree with, though I'd want to clarify -- it does not follow that the former is the latter.
Human beings, like everything else, have a telos, which is happiness.* Happiness in this context doesn't mean an emotion, in the way that most people mean it. It doesn't mean delight, pleasure or even joy, although all of these result from it. It encompasses notions such as flourishing, or fulfillment, or beatitude, or rest, and still can't be reduced to any of these. A proper discussion of it would take too long. But everybody wants to be happy.
Unlike acorns and water, we can choose whether or not we move towards our telos. An acorn may fail to grow into an oak tree, but it obviously has never has a choice in whether it does so. If an acorn is crushed, it probably won't grow into an oak tree, and is to this extent a bad acorn. By contrast, a human being can choose his actions: he can choose actions that tend towards his telos, or that tend away from his telos. A deliberate action is good to the extent that it brings about our telos (which is happiness), and bad to the extent that it fails to do so. This is both 'morally good', and good in the more general sense, in that sense that an acorn or even a car is good.
The great grandparent's point was that if you undermine telos, you undermine any objective basis for morality. And this is true. It isn't even limited to materialism. If someone says we must follow God's commands, he can't explain without telos why we must do so, though he may describe incentives for our doing so. Morality would still be absurd.
That's what I mean when I say "truthy-sounding". It seems to wrap things in a nice neat little box, it certainly sounds profound, until you really look at it and realize, oh no, that didn't solve anything.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Nobody is saying "we know about telos now, we don't need to investigate anything else". Least of all Aristotle! Nothing in the notion of telos undermines the need for empirical investigation. If you can show me a line of Aristotle that even hints at this idea, I'd love to see it.
* I take some issue with the grandparent's definition of happiness, but I think we'd both agree that happiness is humanity's telos
I admit this is a daunting state of affairs which is not pleasant to contemplate, but I don't adopt beliefs on the basis of what is pleasant or unpleasant or easy or not easy. I adopt them, as far as I have the agency to do so, on the basis of what seems plausible and, given how I understand the universe, your account seems highly implausible.
On the other hand, if you insist that there are no human beings, you should adopt the values/morals of Buddhism, since your arguments of non-existence are very similar to Buddhist arguments.
* Have low expectations
* Enjoy simple things
* Don't care too much* Don't argue with people on the internet
You'd be inherently happier, also:
* Enjoy irony when you can
On the other hand that was not true of my EX-wife.
- Convert your personal Needs to your Wants/Wishes.
A geometric simplex, not a simple linear scale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplex
Living a happy life and living a meaningful life aren't entirely the same thing. Not that you claimed they were, but I personally find it fruitful to cognate on the different lifestyles implied by optimizing for different values and how they fit together.
In particular, as we get older I think we also get more skillful at handling our own internal and external conditions to create a comfortable-like happiness. However, one of those skills is filtering out potentials for discomfort from unexpected events. Well made plans and expertly crafted systems of comfort also function as barriers between you and the larger world in a sense. Is that desirable?
In my experience, negative-valence emotions like non-panic fear, confusion, dissatisfaction, et al necessarily invoke an associated underlying value, providing a creative and productive impetus to produce said value(s). How desirable is that?
</musings>
Not at all, Epicurus
asserted that philosophy's purpose is to attain as well as to help others attain happy (eudaimonic), tranquil lives characterized by ataraxia (peace and freedom from fear) and aponia (the absence of pain).
He advocated that people were best able to pursue philosophy by living a self-sufficient life surrounded by friends.
He taught that the root of all human neuroses is denial of death and the tendency for human beings to assume that death will be horrific and painful, which he claimed causes unnecessary anxiety, selfish self-protective behaviors, and hypocrisy.
It can have many forms - which job you take, where you decide to move/settle, partners, family decisions etc.
One random example - I know tons of people from ie high school that could permanently improve their lives if they properly (re)learned a given foreign language. They have plenty of time. But they are too much in their 'comfort' zone to even try, even though they are rarely actually long term happy. Sometimes the effort would be couple of months, sometimes one long afternoon.
Another personal one - moving to a better country. Few challenging months of looking for job on site (which also gave tons of personal growth and mental resilience), accommodation, understanding and adapting to different society etc. and riding the resulting improved situation for rest of my life. Nobody too chill is ever going to wade through that.
One mistake is to start effort and just keep pushing for next challenges and achievements. Eventually everybody hits the wall, physical or mental. It may look great from outside, but thats about it. And a lot of damage in life can be already done at that point.
* have money
You have to take into account the difference of each mind's disposition between people. There are people who would just read those 3 bullet points and be disgusted. Some people need an empty pointless life and are "happy". Some people need struggle, challenge and difficulty, otherwise they cant be happy.
People and minds are extremely complicated. To me, having low expectations and not caring too much is a sign of a defeated person with no spirit. That is sad
What makes a good knife? Of course, a good knife is a knife that cuts well.
But what does it mean to cut well? Just the sharpness of the blade? What about grip comfort? And balancing? And stickiness? And weight? And what about the thing being cut? Can a knife cut everything well?
As you can see, we are already dead in our tracks, as asking what makes a knife good is basically on the same level of complexity of asking the same thing about a human, and this is why ancient philosophers, many of whom didn't really explore nuance, should be critically studied, without falling for simplistic "this is my hero" behavior
Sometimes I wonder if Aristotle was just trying to skate by without being called. Or truth really is that nuanced and simple and can’t be defined any more distinctly.
All of these guidances seem true but also sort of vapid. Be smart, be kind, be virtuous. I’m not sure how Aristotle measured and confirmed his happiness and goodness of life.
It seems to me to be quite easy to convince myself I’m happy and have others impressed enough that they assume I’m happy; yet not actually be happy.
But what does it mean to cut? What is sharpness? How does one define it? What is a blade? What does it mean for something to be "comfortable"? How does one define weight: how does one define if something is "heavy" or "light"? What does it mean that something "is"?
Seriously: at some point the drilling down into definitions and saying the other person's argument does not answer everything can get ridiculous.
In this case the knife is an analogy: don't take it literally and move on with the actual argument/discussion being made.
Except you don't do every time and on every topic. The topic now is happiness: it is not necessary to talk about what "is" means here.
If you want to talk about ontology[0] submit an article on it.
Couldn't we say that most of Plato's is about progressively refining from a rough starting point for example? Or, consider even ITT how interpreting Aristotle properly requires understanding the nuances of his original vocabulary.
Regarding the knife example, while there's value in going deeper for those willing to study knife handling, it was probably not deemed relevant to the point being made: a tool is a good tool if it can perform a reasonably well-suited task, when used by someone reasonably skilled.
This is an abstract point of view, which can be appreciated by anyone working with tools, from cooks to programmers: in any domain, a good tool is one which fulfills the task for which it was originally conceived.
Citation needed
> First of all, what makes a thing a good thing? A good thing fulfils its unique function.
Something can be good or even the best without being unique, in fact we can only say things are good relatively to other things in a similar category, otherwise we cannot know. Good or bad only makes sense by comparison and uniqueness is rarely the factor.
> what is unique about humans: We have a soul that thinks and feels
Have you ever interacted with a dog for more than 30 seconds?
Philosophers are very good at telling others how to be happy while living miserable lives.
Like
> > what is unique about humans: We have a soul that thinks and feels
> Have you ever interacted with a dog for more than 30 seconds?
You're engaging with half a sentence. The important part is thinks.
Aristotle and Plato broke down the human soul into three parts. A hungry part that we share with plants, animals and other humans, an emotional part that we share with animals, and a rational "thinking" part that humans alone possess (though later thinkers like Pico della Mirandola suggest we share it with the angels).
And I've read plenty of philosophy and engage with it just fine. I think it's perfectly fine to break apart the basic premises of something because you avoid wasting the time reading the conclusions.
And in fact my criticism is to the author, not to Aristotle or Plato, although I don't agree with all that I've read that they wrote they were much smarter than me. I just have been able to read way more than them.
This is certainly an assertion, given it's hard, bordering on impossible to to demonstrate that other humans think.
Philosophy is also not about what we think is true, but what statements we can defend. Solipsism is a notoriously difficult position to attack, even if we do not subscribe to it.
When I say thinking I mean things like planning to get a snack by pushing a chair in front of a counter to then jump up and open a cabinet and then even being ingenious enough to pretend not to have done it, even putting the chair back and hiding the snack if spotted. This is obviously not just "see snack get snack" reactive operation. What I think is debatable dogs may have are things like metacognition which I'd put under the consciousness umbrella. Even that I've seen examples, but I agree its much rarer.
The fashion in which they do it is recognized by Aristotle in Historia Animalium, as well as in Metaphysics and De Anima.
He also mentions it in passing in Nicomachean Ethics (III.ii)
> Choice, then, seems to be voluntary, but not the same thing as the voluntary; the latter extends more widely. For both children and the lower animals share in voluntary action, but not in choice, and acts done on the spur of the moment we describe as voluntary, but not as chosen.
* https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.3.iii.html
> It seems that choosing is willing, but that the two terms are not identical, willing being the wider. For children and other animals have will, but not choice or purpose; and acts done upon the spur of the moment are said to be voluntary, but not to be done with deliberate purpose.
* https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/aristotle/nicomachean-ethi...
The "ancient wisdom" we consume now is coming from that segment of the Greek and Roman societies.
There's also Epictetus. That man can hardly be accused of being a spoiled aristocrat.
Interesting ideas are disproportionately likely to come from people who have a lot of leisure time, as that is a prerequisite for having the time to think about anything.
The path to transformation should be the collective consensus towards new visions of society, not some individual acts of virtue signalling.
Why do you think engaging with Plato and Aristotle will make you a recluse?
> The path to transformation should be the collective consensus towards new visions of society,
You use a should statement. Why should it be this way? Who has decided this is the way it should be? Also why does there need to be transformation?
> not some individual acts of virtue signalling.
Virtue ethics is also not the same as virtue signalling. Virtues in virtue ethics are for your own benefit. It's even a common point to do good things and not tell other people in e.g. stoic and early christian thought, as doing things to raise your esteem in the eyes of others is prideful and not virtuous.
The life is more complex because of the muddled and complex intellectual frameworks. This is because the 3-5 letter word concepts need to be defined to make sure everybody is talking about the same thing when people have to interact with more people.
No we aren't. People choose (or not) to make their lives complex, it isn't forced upon them.
Can you elaborate ? From a quick read, the concept of good ("A good thing fulfils its unique function") and how to be a good human ("to have an excellent soul. And this excellence reveals itself in a clear intellect and a noble character.") seems timeless to me
Of course, some will try to argue by twisting these concepts into some modern hedonistic feelsgood version not even fit as a parody.
Ever heard of how Socrates died? haha
He was accused by poets and politicians, not the common man. Most probably because he rubbed some powerful people in the wrong way; the modern consensus makes a believable point about it being political, Socrates not being a democracy fanboy and all.
Most of the arguments can be seen as overthinking. This is how we make our life worse.
On the contrary, I think we've learned something since about the importance of distinguishing "good" from "effective".