Aristotles Way
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- Author: Edith Hall
Highlights
Almost everyone believes that they want to be happy, which usually means a lasting psychological state of contentment
Paradoxically, in our everyday conversations, happiness far more often refers to the trivial and temporary glee of a meal, cocktail, email message. Or, as Lucy in the Peanuts comic strip put it after hugging Snoopy, an encounter with ‘a warm puppy’. A ‘happy birthday’ is a few hours of enjoyment to celebrate the anniversary of your birth.
Becoming subjectively happy as an individual, Aristotle insisted, is your unique and momentous responsibility.
Modern antidepressants, which can benefit people either in temporary grief in reaction to life events, or suffering from ‘endogenous’, persistent depression, mostly enhance the levels of serotonin. But is a cheerful outlook happiness? Can a life spent watching television qualify as happiness?
Social media creates seratonin? Or is it dopamine? And does tbhis ebtail social.media makes us happy?
Robert Nozick published Anarchy, State, and Utopia, in which he envisioned a machine capable of giving people continuous pleasurable experiences throughout their lives. These people would not be able to differentiate these simulated machine experiences from ‘real life’.
since the way of life he advocates concerns a moral and psychological excellence rather than one that lies in material possessions or bodily splendour. There are also more difficult obstacles: having children or friends who are completely depraved is one such obstacle.
In fact, the only way to be a good person is to do good things. You have to treat people with fairness repeatedly. You need to offer cheerfully to share fifty-fifty the weekend childcare with your co-parent and always pay your domestic cleaner in full if you cancel her session.
Each of us needs to acquire self-knowledge and decide what sort of ethical sustenance we need to provide for ourselves. Is it offering help, relinquishing grudges, learning to apologise, or something else entirely?
According to him, the ultimate goal of human life is, simply, happiness, which means finding a purpose in order to realise your potential and working on your behaviour to become the best version of yourself. You are your own moral agent, but act in an interconnected world where partnerships with other people are of great significance.
His leitmotifs are working with the situation you find at hand, forethought, an unrelenting focus on intentions, flexibility, practical common sense, individual autonomy and the importance of consultation with others.
The basic premise of Aristotle’s notion of happiness is wonderfully simple and democratic: everyone can decide to be happy.
To Live Well requires being able to act as an independent moral agent and not have your deliberated choices of action limited by obligations to others.
written memoir Wave (2013).
Aristotle cites Solon’s precept, and approves of it insofar as it requires thinking about your future and how you are going to face the challenges it brings.
To Aristotle, it means realising your potential, and so it is never too late to start to become ‘true to yourself’. The English word ‘realise’ has two meanings – becoming conscious of, and turning into reality – and Aristotle’s idea involves both.
Creating happiness means, above all, spending our lives enabled to do what we are best at and enjoy.
What happens when what we are best at differs from what we enjoy? Can we find e joyment simply through expertise?
I guess Aristotle woukd say that deeper engagement with life and evrything brings more happiness.
A human being’s material cause (1) is the organic matter – blood, flesh, bone – out which you are made. Your efficient cause (2) is the parents who made you. Your formal cause (3) is the DNA which determined your genetic make-up, appearance, and constitution. The only cause in your own control is your final cause (4), the reason and purpose of your existence.
A person who is a good doctor was born with the intellectual potential to learn medical lore. Once trained, a doctor has the potential to heal a patient. But she can decide not to treat the patient, or to treat the patient in a way which will be damaging rather than beneficial. It is only rational activity – thought – intentionally applied to the goal of healing the patient which will actualise the doctor’s potential to heal. The doctor needs to decide to help the patient back to health, and also needs to deliberate about which treatments are most likely to achieve that goal. Being a good doctor requires all four of these things: potentiality, training, intention and reasoning. So does being a good and happy person.
The qualities reqired to be a good pilot, a good husband, a good friend are the same as those required for happiness.
note that by qualities i.mean potentialities
Dynamis, in your own case, means the bundle of natural qualities, talents and aptitudes nature gave you. If you are a mature adult, only you can assess what these really are, based on your own desires and experiences, perhaps in discussion with honest friends or counsellors.
If the young human is not fed, cuddled, and exposed to the alphabet, they will be malnourished, psychologically damaged and illiterate. We now know that the ‘rational’ part of the human brain, the frontal cortex, does not even get fully ‘wired up’ until the mid-twenties,
Every individual can decide for themselves what good things they want to achieve, and then apply themselves to acquiring the skills, situations and partners which will make it possible to achieve the goal.
An unplanned life is indeed less worth living. In the Nicomachean
Everybody who is able to live according to their own purposive choice should set before themselves some goal [skopos] to aim at through living in a good way – the goal could be achieving recognition, or distinction, or wealth, or culture – on which they will keep their eyes fixed in everything they do. It is clearly a sign of foolishness not to create order in your life in terms of having an end [telos].
The really important things we want to do need only to be in our heads in rough outline: the details can be filled in, like a painting, as we proceed.
Really the question is: what do i want? And of the things i want, what is fleeting and what is a true want?
But there are also vast numbers of children even in wealthy countries, with compulsory schooling, who will never fulfil their potential either. This is either because they are hot-housed and pressurised too early (remember that frontal cortex which remains underdeveloped until the age of twenty-five?) or because nobody tries to help them. Every child is good at something, and usually they enjoy what they are good at. The pleasure means that the talent, once identified, could be a useful guide to what kind of employment or career to choose. Exposing your child to many different stimuli and activities, while watching out for signs of an enthusiastic response, is not so very difficult. But it is amazing how few parents help their progeny identify their natural talent.
Aristotle noticed that people who get pleasure from their work are almost always best at it.
Indeed this k why maby pilots also play in their soare time. It is also why as flight instructors we were good. However does this accoub for becoming jaded? Overworkkd? Tired?
Or is it simply that al these choices i made before 25, instead of lesrbing enoigh about other thibgs.
In the Nicomachean Ethics he admits that people who have considerable hands-on experience of an activity may be much more useful than those who have studied its underlying theoretical principles. He suggests that there were dietary advisers in ancient Greece who never went to the market or did any cooking. ‘If a man knows that light meat is easily digested and therefore wholesome, but does not know what kinds of meat are light, he will not be so likely to restore you to health.’
The dietitian reminds me of Dylan.
A report compiled for the government uncovered the appalling statistic that 37% of working British adults believe that their job is pointless and not making a meaningful contribution to the world.
Is my job pointless? What contribution am i maling to the world?
Even if a competently deliberated plan fails, it is important, in hindsight, when analysing the reasons for the outcome, to recognise that it was because of chance and not lack of effort.
For Aristotle, deliberation has a very specific sense. It is not about our final ends – a doctor does not deliberate about her intention, which is obviously to produce health in her patient. It is about choosing the best means to achieve our ends. The doctor deliberates about what course of action and treatment will restore the patient’s health. Analogously, we know happiness is our goal, but deliberate about the means of achieving it
Aristotle tells his audience in Greece that there is no point in deliberating about ‘affairs in India’, for ‘they do not rest with us’ any more than it is within our remit ‘to turn a circle into a square’.
if you want to achieve happiness, you must take responsibility for your own actions and indeed failures to act. ‘Of things which it depends on a person to do or not to do, he is himself the cause, and what he is the cause of depends on himself’, Aristotle writes, asserting that we all have the free will to act as good or bad people.
It developed out of the conviction that since there are arbitrary factors at play which you can’t control – that is, luck – you can never guarantee that you will take the correct decision. But you can guarantee that you prepare for the decision-taking in the manner which maximises your chances of success and happiness.
Finally, although thinking about and practising the rules of deliberation can be time-consuming, you will enjoy life more by not worrying so much. The imperative to deliberate competently simply does not apply when you can’t change anything.
A golden rule, therefore, is to change tack or introduce a completely different type of information at about the seventeenth minute, and, in a fifty-minute lecture, again at about the thirty-fifth. And point out the gear change firmly.
He correctly believed that they accelerated learning. Because the listeners need to consider in what respect the two things being compared are similar (why are the rays of the sun like fingers?), they actively participate in a process of learning something about the appearance of both suns and hands.
‘The same then is true of the virtues’, says Aristotle. ‘It is by taking part in transactions with our fellow men that some of us become fair-minded and others iniquitous; by acting in dangerous situations and forming a habit of fear or of confidence we become courageous or cowardly. And the same holds good of our dispositions with regard to our bodily appetites, and anger; some men become self-controlled and gentle, others profligate and irascible.’
Note the emphasis on habit. Lik maby thibgs regardibg humans, it seems habit is what truly makes us. We are our habits.
‘know yourself’ (gnothi seauton): Socrates, Plato’s teacher, had also been fond of quoting this maxim. But if you do not ‘know yourself’ or are not prepared to admit you are, for example, stingy, or fond of malicious gossip, then you might as well stop reading here. Aristotelian ethics require telling yourself home truths because they are not judgemental and are meant to be feasible. The imperative is not to judge yourself harshly and descend into self-castigation or self-dislike.
I can be jeakous and often selfish. Impatient wheb thibgs are bkt the qay i expect them to
Anger is essential to a healthy personality, and someone who never feels anger is not always going to do the right thing and will therefore not achieve happiness. Yet too much anger is also a shortcoming or defect – a vice. It is always a question of the right amount at the right time.
But envy of purely natural endowment, such as Aristotle’s intellectual gifts, is a happiness-wrecker. It can warp the envious person’s very personality and lead to obsession. It can lead to wholly undeserved attacks on the target of the envy; in the modern world these often take the form of vicious trolling or cyber attacks.
AM i envious of my friends? Of their natural endowments? Nkt so much i think as i am self concious of my self percieved lack of intellectual ability or.memory - the issue is not them, but me.
of ckurse, i do feel jealousy of say Chris. But envy of wealth does nkt define me.
Aristotle recommends asking whether you are envying someone because they have acquired an unfair share of society’s rewards or because they were born more naturally blessed than you. In the former case, your envy can energise you to seek justice and equality, but in the latter case, reflect on how that person’s inborn gifts actually enhance your own life.
‘those who do not get angry at things at which it is right to be angry are considered foolish, and so are those who do not get angry in the right manner, at the right time, for the right length of time, and with the right
But people who are bitter, brooding and sullen by nature are seriously problematic: ‘they remain angry a long time, because they keep their wrath in’. If you do not show your anger when you feel it, you ‘labour under a sense of resentment’. Since your anger is concealed, nobody tries to placate you, ‘and it takes a long time to digest one’s wrath within one. Bitterness is the most troublesome form of bad temper both to a man himself and to his nearest friends.’
Aristotle does not dismiss altogether the pleasure of revenge. He also realises that revenge is often about restoring our honour or status if we have been slighted. I have a close friend who made a point of being seen at a workplace party in a new dress with a handsome man, and thus making an ex-husband who had treated her badly both respect her and feel pain at losing her. She says that it was one of the best moments of her life and that it has made it much easier for her to move on and pursue happiness
revenge is likely to be virtuous and thus conducive to your happiness only if a wrong has been committed which can be righted by revenge.
it is a mark of a generous nature to have little regard for oneself’.
Application of pre-existing rules in a way that is tempered by equity is like measuring a stone with a ruler which is not rigid but made of a material that can bend. The masons of Lesbos, he says, measure curving stones with flexible rulers made of lead. They apply the same preordained units of measurement, but result in a far more accurate reading because they can bend around the stone – ‘yield’ to its curves, just as a good judge will mould the laws based on general principles to the minutiae of a particular moral situation.
In particular this reminds meof Les Miserables. The stealing of bread in thag book may be wrong, sure but equiity would suggest it is ok.
This concerpt also solves many issues that we think are morally ambiguous because we are attached to a si gle form of law or a si gle blanket applicTIon of a moral system
Marriage, for Aristotle, is only (although significantly) distinguished from other friendships in its increased intensity and shared investment in raising mutual offspring. This also applies to close kin bonds between parent and child and siblings: the difference between such bonds and friendships beyond the family is solely a quantitative difference of degree and intensity.
many utterly charming people who can thoroughly enhance your life as a pleasure friend can never be more than that.
It is amazing how few couples have held even one honest conversation about their visions of the future together before they embark on a serious relationship. There is little point, if your aims include raising children, in choosing as a life partner someone whose aims do not. If you are extremely career-focused, then things will not function with a spouse who can’t accommodate your spending a great deal of time and energy at work.
In Aristotle’s political theory, our relationships with fellow citizens are a special subcategory of utility friendship, since they exist for mutual advantage and cease when mutual self-interest ceases. City-states malfunction when there are no friendly partnerships in operation between the individuals who constitute the state. A trenchant account of the potential degradation of all relationships in a malfunctioning state was published in Agamemnon’s Daughter by Ismail Kadare (2003). This novel uses the sacrifice of the heroine in Euripides’ tragedy Iphigenia in Aulis (by which, as it happens, Aristotle was also fascinated) as a paradigm for the effect in the early 1980s of the dehumanising regime in Albania and the moral degeneracy that afflicts any population ruled by an unaccountable government.
Afammemnons Daughter, Kadsre (2003). The whote below sounds very much like American politics.