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Comment by Almondsetat | Hacker News Reader

The very beginning of this post contains a critical passage.

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

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Actually, your analysis only seems to make sense because you ignored the beginning of the explanation. I'll rephrase it here in other words: "Man's good can only consist in the 'work' that is peculiar to him, that is, the work that he and only he knows how to perform, just as, in general, the good of each thing consists in the work that is peculiar to that thing. The work of the eye is to see, the work of the ear is to hear, and so on." So, it becomes obvious that making an analysis based on the universal concept of "knife" and judging it by its ability to literally cut anything is absurd. The more accurate approach would be to judge a "kitchen knife" by its ability to help in cooking tasks, and we can be even more specific by talking about knives for bread, meat, tomatoes, etc. And I find it quite strange to question "what does it mean to cut well?" If I give you a dull blade and a sharp one for a specific task, you'll know exactly which one 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?

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.

That is also a bit of what philosophy is and in the exercise of fractally dissecting everything sometimes we uncover some new way of looking at things or deepen our understanding a bit more.

> […] and in the exercise of fractally dissecting everything […]

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology

So if I don't have to take it literally I have to go with my own interpretation, which might be different from Aristotle's and voids the entire purpose of writing down his teachings.

> So if I don't have to take it literally I have to go with my own interpretation […]

https://xkcd.com/1860/

While I can largely accept this criticism, I’d also like to point out that it might be missing the spirit of a lot of ancient philosophers historical context. For starters a lot of their books and texts have been lost so we aren’t sure for several what nuance has been lost. Secondarily a lot of that nuance you describe was meant to be explored via shared dialogue (the Socratic method) between pupil and teacher, until a common and nuanced understanding of the topic was achieved, not just studied out of a book, which was enormously expensive and not at all available to most people in the first place. I’d largely view their teachings as a starting point upon which to build a dialogue and nuanced understanding with a long since dead teacher.

While I can largely accept this criticism, the author of the blog post is not partaking in the discourse, but is instead reporting a summarized version of what Aristotle, maybe, said, presenting it as a definitive guide. This is why I originally said that more ancient authors need to be carefully studied, since they didn't have the means of explaining themselves and correcting their ideas through numerous and verbose publications.

I thought the same thing. This seems like a rhetorical technique to just shove the definition down one layer. But it sounds right.

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.

> and this is why ancient philosophers, many of whom didn't really explore nuance

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.

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