Transcription
Every great work of philosophy is trying to answer a question. And in Aristotle's *Nicomachean Ethics*, that question is simple: What is the best human life? We are going to try and answer that question by looking closely at this book, the *Nicomachean Ethics*.
The *Nicomachean Ethics* is actually made up of 10 books. So, one way that we could explain what it's all about, and also just Aristotle's theory of the good life and his ethical theory, would be to go book by book. But the thing is, I've already done that. I did it over on my Substack. If you want to read those, you can read all those posts for free; there's a link down below in this video. Instead, I'm going to talk about key themes to the *Nicomachean Ethics* and try to explain them for you in a fairly short amount of time. And so all of those themes will come together and answer Aristotle's question. So we're going to talk about happiness; we're going to talk about what the virtues are; the difference between Aristotle and the Stoics; Aristotle's theory of friendship; and then also the role of contemplation in the good life.
But before we can do any of that, we need to talk about who Aristotle was. Aristotle sits along giants of philosophy like Plato, Kant, Hegel, and Spinoza, as a wide-ranging and systematic thinker. He was interested in quite literally everything. He has writings on rhetoric, metaphysics, meteorology, geology, biology—it's really quite incredible. Born in 384, Aristotle studied under Plato for nearly 20 years before he would go on and found his own school, the Lyceum. That school survived until the Roman general Sulla destroyed it in 86 BC. Until the advent of modern science with figures like Galileo, Aristotle's way of viewing the world was widely dominant. His work in metaphysics was foundational in medieval philosophy, and I would include not just the Western European world but also the Islamic world in that generalization. And his work in logic was still being taught up until the 19th century, until we had the rise of mathematical logic. Our focus today, Aristotle's ethics, was really foundational in medieval theology. An important point of contact would be Thomas Aquinas, as he's integrating it into a Christian way of viewing the world. Aquinas takes on much of Aristotle's system, though he makes significant modifications along the way. This form of ethics is called virtue ethics.
Like much of Aristotle's thought, virtue ethics largely fell out of favor. If you look at the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Protestant Reformation, the rise of a mechanistic worldview—all of this marked some kind of turning away from Aristotle. But then, in the mid-20th century, virtue ethics became significantly more popular, especially in the English-speaking philosophical academy. That is largely due to thinkers like Elizabeth Anscombe and Alasdair MacIntyre, though there are many others. We've seen a huge increase in interest in Aristotle's ethics, Platonist virtue ethics, Stoic ethics, and even just attempts at creating a more modern iteration of virtue ethics that are inspired by, but not totally beholden to, Aristotle and his contemporaries. Virtue ethicists always make virtue a key part of their theories; it will be the center of their ethical theories. But they're always still interested in that question that Aristotle was asking in the *Nicomachean Ethics*, which is: What is the best human life?
By asking that question, we can already see that Aristotle is making some assumptions. The first assumption he is presuming that there is a single answer to that question. This conflicts with our modern way of thinking. We generally like to believe that people can define what is good for them or what is the best life for them. So we might say that there are as many good or best lives as there are individuals. This really is our kind of liberal individualist way of viewing the world, and you might even argue that it comes out most strongly post-World War II in the existentialists. But that's not how Aristotle views the world. He really does think that there is a single answer to the question: What is the best human life? The second assumption he's making is that it's about human lives; namely, the fact that we are human matters. And that is because Aristotle is an essentialist. He believes that we have to give a theory of ethics in terms of what kind of creature we are, or we could say in terms of our essence. To give that kind of theory, you have to look at what is distinctive about us. And Aristotle would say that what is distinctive about human beings is the fact that we are rational, or that we possess a rational soul. Our capacity for reason is highly relevant when you're giving a theory of the best kind of human life, especially when we get to the role of contemplation, though that's not coming until the end of the video.
So Aristotle writes a book like the *Nicomachean Ethics* because he wants to answer this question. But it's not just a theoretical matter. He writes that the end involved is not knowledge but action. The point of this book is to become good. You could think of the *Nicomachean Ethics* as something like an ancient philosophical self-help book, though it's a very different kind of self-help than you would find, say, on the shelves of your local bookstore. The aim of the work is to help us become better. We study ethics so that we can become better. But to become better, you have to be aiming at something. Aristotle says that every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action as well as choice, is held to aim at some good. He goes on to say that the good, the highest good, is that at which all things aim. So everything we do, whether that's researching biology, doing philosophy, raising horses, being generals—any of that—it's all aiming at a good, and ultimately it's aiming at the good. But what is the highest good? Well, the philosopher Richard Kraut says that it would have three distinct features: it would be desirable for itself; it is not desirable for the sake of some other good; and all other goods are desirable for its sake. When Aristotle needs to identify something with the highest good, he says that it's happiness; that is the thing which makes all other things desirable and which we desire for its own sake. But Aristotle breaks that down further and actually gives a definition of happiness. He says that happiness is a rational activity of the soul in accord with virtue. If you were taking notes on this video, that would be the kind of thing you want to write down.
The soul, for Aristotle, has parts, and one of those parts we can call the intellect. The Greek word here is *nous*. My Greek pronunciation is not great, by the way. This is the only time in the video I'll apologize about it, but uh, it's not great. In another work, *De Anima*, Aristotle describes the intellect as the part of the soul by which it knows and understands. The intellect is sensitive to reasons, meaning that it can weigh reasons for and against something. Another way of talking about something being sensitive to reasons is to say that it's rational; it can actually be persuaded through rational argumentation. Rational activities are just going to be those activities which are a product of the rational soul, or here the intellect. So it's not just activities that are done instinctually that make someone happy; it actually has to do with how we are exercising our reason. And when we're judging whether or not we are acting rightly, well, we use virtues as the standard by which we can judge our rational activities. When the soul acts rationally in accord with virtue, we say that someone is happy. The Greek word here is *eudaimonia*, which is also sometimes translated as flourishing. I actually prefer rendering it as flourishing, but quite often in translations, including the one that I usually read, it is rendered as happiness, and so I will just say happiness throughout the rest of this video.
Aristotle's understanding of happiness, though, is going to be different than our own. Once again, we are seeing a place where Aristotle is not in alignment with—maybe we could call—a very generic modern way of thinking, because we think about happiness primarily as something that you feel. You feel happy. When we say that you are happy, we would also say that you feel happy. But for Aristotle, that's not the case. Happiness isn't a feeling at all; happiness is a state of being, or rather a state of acting in the right sort of way. This means also that you could call yourself happy, but you could actually be wrong about that, especially if you didn't know what virtue was.
Before we go on to define what virtue is, so we can get a little bit closer to figuring out how to live a good life according to Aristotle, let's take a step back and think about the larger project of the *Nicomachean Ethics*. And one of the things that I think is most helpful is to contrast the *Nicomachean Ethics* with more modern philosophical theories. The biggest difference that we see between Aristotle and modern moral philosophy is its emphasis on character rather than on action. A deontologist, like Immanuel Kant, would say that ethics is about following the right sort of rules, and you need to identify the moral law, and then you need to do everything that you can to follow it, and probably to want to follow it. It's a fairly rigid kind of legalistic view of morality. A consequentialist, on the other hand, like the utilitarians, would say that right and wrong action just is about maximizing good consequences and minimizing bad consequences. The utilitarians would say that it's just about maximizing pleasure. And we can see where these theories disagree with each other when we put them into fun examples like the trolley problem, if you care at all about that. But when Aristotle writes about ethics, he's not primarily writing about right and wrong action; he's actually writing about what makes you a good human being, or we could say what it means for you to have a good character. He is actually looking to help you improve yourself, to improve your character, or as we would say, to become virtuous.
This is something that Aristotle gets from Plato. In Plato's *Laws*, the idea is that a statesman has an obligation to the citizens; his role is to make sure that the citizens are able to perform noble acts and that they can develop their character in the right sort of way. But this idea of developing your character is more of a general Greek obsession than it is just idiosyncratic to Plato and Aristotle. The fundamental question for Greek ethics really is: What should my life be like? Or, probably putting it in those Aristotelian terms, what is the best human life? The commentator and philosopher Julia Annas describes this as making sense of my life as a whole, which involves taking stock of where you've come from, where you are now, and then figuring out how you would like to continue when you go into the future. So it's not just about giving a theory of what are the right or wrong actions to take; it's actually about giving a theory of your entire life. That is the project of the *Nicomachean Ethics*.
So Aristotle is saying that the best human life is a happy life, and happiness is rational activity of the soul in accord with virtue. And that means we need to define what virtue is. A virtue is a character trait; it is a disposition to do the right thing at the right time. You could also call a virtue a particular kind of habit. Aristotle does not believe that we are born virtuous, but instead we all have the capacity to become virtuous if we undergo the right sort of process. To become virtuous, you have to go through two stages of development. First, you have to be trained in the right sort of way. This ideally happens in childhood. This helps you build those habits in the first place. In the second stage of development, though, you start to develop practical wisdom. The Greek word here is *phronesis*, and a popular translation of *phronesis* is prudence. Prudence is the name for those activities of the intellect which have to do with practical action. If you go through these two stages of development, you will habitually do the right thing because you've been trained in the right sort of way, but you're also able to think about ethics correctly, which is going to help you when you are in new or unfamiliar situations.
As you're being trained in virtue, what is really happening is that you were learning to find a path between two vices, because Aristotle says that every virtue sits between two vices. The virtuous person is able to find what we sometimes call the Aristotelian mean. So take courage as an example. The two vices that are related to courage are recklessness or foolhardiness—the translations vary here—and cowardice. The reckless person is someone who is too willing to throw themselves into danger; they're not able to adequately assess the risk; they really don't know what they're doing; they're going to get themselves killed; they're going to get other people killed; they're not actually being courageous, even though it kind of looks like that to us. The cowardly person is someone who is too afraid; they let their fear dominate them; they would not put themselves at risk in order to save people, even when they really ought to. Courage sits somewhere in between cowardice and recklessness, but the virtuous person has to figure out exactly where it sits. Sometimes we say that it's the mean, and that could imply that it sits exactly in the middle between the two virtues, but Aristotle says that ethics is an imprecise area of inquiry, so it's never going to be that straightforward. Sometimes a virtue will more closely resemble one of those two vices, I think, according to Aristotle, but this is my interpretation: courage looks more like recklessness than it does like cowardice. But that's me editorializing here. If, instead of being virtuous, you are more closely aligned with one of those vices, then we say that you are vicious. That's not a word that we like to use very often because it sounds like we're calling you mean, but we're not calling you mean or cruel; we're just saying that you have character traits that are vices rather than virtues. For all of the other moral virtues, Aristotle gives roughly the same analysis; there's one exception, justice, but we won't talk about that here.
In addition to the moral virtues, though, we have those intellectual virtues, and the most important of the intellectual virtues for ethics is prudence—that's practical wisdom, or *phronesis*. Prudence is what lets you think through practical action appropriately. When I was writing my weekly post about Aristotle this summer, I had a little discussion group, and we talked about how you can gain prudence, because in all the other areas of the virtues, it seems like there's a kind of path to becoming more courageous; you would basically learn by imitation. In the case of prudence, though, um, I don't know how one becomes more prudent or develops practical wisdom. I don't have any practical advice for you there.
Now, if you know anything about virtues, you might be wondering why I haven't used a particular phrase, and that's cardinal virtues. The cardinal virtues are said to be these foundational virtues that maybe are the most important ones, or they're the foundation for all the other virtues. Descriptions of the cardinal virtues vary in different sources. The typical list of cardinal virtues we get from Plato, and that's wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice. The reason I haven't mentioned it in this video, though, is because Aristotle does not seem to place such an emphasis on those four virtues in particular. All four of those virtues are important to Aristotle, but he never identifies those, I believe, as the four most important or key virtues. Aristotle lists the virtues in his work on rhetoric, and he gives the list as justice, courage, temperance, magnificence, magnanimity, liberality, gentleness, prudence, and wisdom. And then, if you look at the *Nicomachean Ethics*, I believe there are 11 moral virtues, and then you have the intellectual virtues on top of that. He does not identify four key virtues that should be your focus.
While virtue is essential to living a good life, Aristotle does not think that virtue alone makes a life good. He would give a list of things like external goods, having friendship, having adequate time to engage in contemplation. Aristotle might even say that if your kids are particularly bad or you're particularly ugly, this can compromise how good your life is. This stands in stark contrast to another ancient school of thought, and that would be the Stoics. The Stoics share with Aristotle a lot of assumptions; they're all virtue ethicists; they all have that essentialist view of humanity that I mentioned before; they all want to engage in this project of making sense of their lives as a whole. But they sharply disagree about what you need in order to make a life good. The Stoics famously say that virtue is always available to basically everybody, and that you could always act virtuously in almost every context; there are small exceptions, but they really are the exceptions. And the Stoics go on to say that virtue alone is sufficient for happiness. So if you are acting virtuously, you are flourishing, and you are happy. All of that other stuff that Aristotle would list—having friends, having adequate leisure time, having external goods like food, or, you know, being attractive—the Stoics would actually say that those are preferred indifferences. This is a case where I think Aristotle at least has the more intuitive view. The Stoic has to explain why preferred indifferences are actually preferred; you know, they are indifferent because they strictly speaking don't matter to the good life, but they're preferred because we can recognize it's better to have them than to not have them. And unless we want to just say that everyone is delusional in preferring to have friends or have good food to eat, we need to actually explain what the basis of that preference is. I think the Stoics have a bit of a weakness there, and some ancient commentators actually made the same kind of argument. At least for Aristotle, he can say that these things are desirable to us and that we are right to desire them because they are good because they all ultimately aim at leading a life of happiness.
And when you're talking about these external goods which are going to help you be happy and to live a good life, there is one that he emphasizes the most; in fact, he devotes a fifth of the *Nicomachean Ethics* to it, and that is friendship. He says that friendship is most necessary with a view to life. He even goes on to say that no one would choose to live if they had no friends. He says that if you are wealthy or rich, you still need to have friends because friends are more important than any of those things. On the Aristotelian picture, friendship is a necessary part of the good life; even if you are engaged in a life of pure contemplation, you will still need friends to do it. It's also just part of our nature. Young people form friendships very, very quickly. Aristotle says that this is just their natural disposition. And when he's discussing the relationship between husbands and wives, Aristotle says that we are better thought of as a coupling creature than a political one. Our desire to bond and to pair off is deep-seated within us; it is part of who we are. And so, for Aristotle, that means it's going to be a part of what the good life looks like. But there are actually several kinds of friends, and which kind of friend you have matters quite a bit. The first type is a friend of pleasure. These are friends that you have just because you enjoy being around them. Most friendships that young people have are friendships of pleasure. You can watch two children quickly form a friendship at a playground, and they will really enjoy it; they will call each other friends, and then one day one of them will decide that he just doesn't like playing with the other one, and the friendship will end, and they'll move on fairly quickly. Friendships of pleasure are like that; they only are sustained so long as it's actually fun to be around. But if your interests start to diverge or you figure out you don't really like the person, the friendship will just end. The other kind of friendship is a friendship of utility. These are friendships you have because they are useful; it's like becoming friends with someone who is more popular than you so that you can be raised in the esteem of other people. Just like friendships of pleasure, friendships of utility don't tend to last, and so these aren't really the kinds of friendships that contribute to a truly great life. But then we have complete friendships. These are also sometimes called friendships of virtue or even philosophical friendships by some commentators. Friends in this case are perfectly alike in virtue; it is as if the two friends can see into each other's souls and just recognize all of their similarities. There; it is very hard to find these friends, especially since most of us are not perfectly virtuous. But these friendships tend to last your entire life. Aristotle says that these types of friends always want to be around each other; they might not live with each other, but they will regularly want to see each other; they will talk regularly; and they will be engaged in the same kinds of projects. And while
This kind of friendship can also have utility and pleasure associated with it. Those are not the grounds of the Friendship. The grounds of the Friendship are that recognition of being perfectly alike in virtue. It's this kind of friendship that really makes life worth living. Aristotle actively advises us to not have too many of these friends, and we shouldn't even want to have too many of them. He doesn't give a minimum number or a maximum, though we know that the minimum is at least one, since you need at least one friend to live a good life. And since ethics is such an imprecise area of inquiry, it's not like we're going to be able to say that the ideal life will involve you having six friends.
But I do think that if we think through some analogies, we can see why you wouldn't want to have too many of these close friends, or why it might not even be possible to have too many. The example I'd like to draw is thinking about a book club. So I like to have book clubs, or discussion groups, or reading groups, whatever you want to call them, and I get more out of them than if I were reading a book on my own. Having that group where I can share ideas and go looking at things from different perspectives, all of that contributes to something I love to do: reading books. And just having one person to read a book with is a huge leap from just reading it on my own. And then if I add two or three people, it's still really great. But as a group gets too big, say above seven or eight people, it starts to be less fun. It's not just that it's diminishing returns; it is actively worse than a small group. It's harder to share all of your ideas or to have a really great discussion. I found when the group gets too large, your close circle of friends—these complete friendships—would be like a really great book club. If you ever join a book club of like 50 people, the only way it is actually succeeding is if whenever you meet you divide into smaller groups; in which case you're not really a single book club, you are a big meeting of several smaller book clubs.
And it's like this too for college courses. The best courses that I ever had were small seminars where I could remember sitting around a table with a professor and just a few very interested students. We were all there for the same reason, and we were all there because we were genuinely interested. That's when we all get the most out of it. But if you have too many people in that room, you miss out. In addition to making life worth living, these friends actually serve a larger function, because a huge part of the good life that we have not talked about yet is engaging in contemplation. And Aristotle thinks that when you contemplate, just like when you're in a book club or in a seminar, it's better when there is more than one. Contemplation, which is *theoria* in Greek, is a peculiar function of human beings. Aristotle would say it is a part of our rational Soul.
Now I am going to flag that this claim is disagreed with by many scholars for many different reasons. Some people disagree with it as an interpretation of Aristotle because they think that contemplation is actually better fit for the Gods in Aristotle rather than just for human beings, so it's not a peculiar thing that we do. Other more modern commentators argue that actually animals can also engage in a life of the intellect, maybe to lesser degrees than us, but they can still do it. And so again, it's not a peculiar function of human beings. But let's just say that it is a peculiar function of human beings, for the purposes of this video. Since it's a peculiar function of human beings, it is essential to the good life; it is what is distinctive about a human life. If you live a life of virtue that does not have contemplation, Aristotle says that you can be happy, but only in a secondary sense; you are missing out on the fullness of a life that also has contemplation. Contemplation, at its most general, is a kind of systematic truth-seeking. You are looking at the world, and in particular those parts of the world that really matter, which Aristotle equates with higher things, Eternal things, unchanging things, and you are just trying to make sense of it all. Really what you're doing is philosophy or science, and the distinction between philosophy and Science in Aristotle's day was significantly blurrier than it would be for us. When you give a theory of human beings as part of your contemplation, you're trying to see how we fit into this larger picture of the world. The contemplative life is the highest form of life according to Aristotle.
And so we can now finally put all of our themes together and talk about is the best human life, and it's a life where you are moderately well off, so you have some external Goods; you're able to adequately meet your needs for food and shelter and maybe engage in some Pleasures some of the time. You are not so well off though that you become greedy or immoderate, basically that you don't become vicious. This life would not be a solitary life; it would be a life of friendships, but you would only have a few close friendships. You would practice the virtues when you had an opportunity to, so you would be courageous, and you would certainly be prudent and wise, and importantly you would have enough leisure time, which is time that is spent away from the necessary labor of meeting your needs, and that Leisure Time would allow you to engage in contemplation. So essentially you would be a modest and virtuous philosopher-scientist. That is the best human life according to Aristotle.
Now I said that a life of contemplation requires Leisure, and this brings us to an accusation that is sometimes leveled against Aristotle, namely that Aristotle is an elitist. And that is because the perfect ideal human life that he describes in this book is not available to everybody. And the criticism says that if it's not available to everybody, then there's something flawed about Aristotle's reasoning, and in fact he's only giving a theory of what a good life would be for Rich free Athenian males who can rely on slave labor and women and other servants in order to meet their needs. For the vast majority of people, though, it would essentially be impossible for them to live lives of contemplation. I actually think, though, that this criticism is wrong, and let me talk about why I believe that Aristotle is roughly correct in outline, not in every detail, about what a good human life is. I think that a good human life requires a moderate amount of external Goods, the practice of virtue, and enough time to engage in contemplation, and I certainly believe that it requires some close friendships. The fact that this life is so rare and so difficult for so many people to achieve does not mean that it's not the best kind of life. I believe what it means is that all of us have an obligation to try to make it so that more and more people could have that kind of life in the future. If the problem is that people have to work too much and thus they are never able to engage in contemplation, then we need to figure out a better relationship with work, not just individually, but culturally, globally even, and that way more people would have that real Leisure Time which would make contemplation possible. If people are distracted in their leisure time because of, you know, social media and phone and too much entertainment and advertisers and opportunists of all types, then we need to figure out Solutions so that again people have a real chance of engaging in contemplation, which will make their lives better. As the world was in Aristotle's day, and as it still is now, Aristotle's theory is exclusionary, but it's not by its nature exclusionary; more and more people can be included if we work to make a better world, and I think that's something that all of us could try and work for. We could work to build a world in which more people can live the best human lives as Aristotle described it, and as I largely agree. And while we're building that world, if you and I can fight off constant distraction from things like our phones, uh, maybe we'll be able to live decent lives as well.
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