Transcription
[Music] welcome back to the book club. I'm Michael Nolles, and today I am very, very happy. I'm very happy to be discussing a book the subject of which is happiness and so much more. That would be the Nicomachean Ethics by Good Old Uncle Aristotle.
I am joined by my friend Charles Kessler, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, professor at the Claremont McKenna College and Claremont Graduate School, and the author of many, many books in his own right. Charles, thank you for being here.
Thank you. But none of them nearly as important as the Nicomachean Ethics.
Yet. Yet, we'll see how they fare over the next 2,300 years. This book was written a very, very long time ago by a very, very smart man that everybody's heard of, though some people might not know very much about. So, in your very best 60 seconds summary, Charles, what is the Nicomachean Ethics?
What is the purpose of life? In a word, happiness. To live a happy life is the highest thing that a human being should aim at. But what does that mean? I think a lot of people consider happiness to be just a state of being, right? But Aristotle says, no, it's an activity, a particular kind of activity in accordance with a particular kind of thing. But it's an activity. And it's, uh, it's not simply pleasure or experiencing pleasure, although it may be pleasant. It may, it has a connection with pleasure, but it's not defined by pleasure. It has a closer connection to morality. And so, in a way, the very reassuring answer that Aristotle gives is that the best guarantee of happiness that you can achieve in this life is to try to be as moral as you can be. The moral person is, in most cases, the happy person because happiness is a state of character, an activity of character. And it is, as you said wisely, it's not exactly the same, but its core is morality. It depends upon morality. And without being a moral person, you can't consistently be a happy person.
But it takes something more than that. You could say the formula is happiness equals character or morality plus some external support. And whether that support is money, does you don't have to be rich to be happy, but you have to be modestly or moderately wealthy at least to be so. And it helps as well. But also just in general, good fortune, you know, that you have enough of the bodily goods like health, and the external goods like friends, and money, and other things, some other things like that to live a complete and, uh, and self-sufficient, as Aristotle would say, happy life.
Right. That sometimes people say money can't buy happiness, but it can buy a jet ski. And have you ever seen an unhappy person on a jet ski? Which actually, probably many of us have. So you need some measure of material wealth just to sustain yourself. And you mentioned friendship, yes, which I obviously agree with. But there are many people who are hardline individualists, self-reliant kind of people who say, I don't really need friends. Why, why? What if, if I'm virtuous, if I'm moral, if I'm not dissolute, and I've got enough money to sustain myself, why does a happy man need friends?
Well, because man is a social animal and a political animal, as Aristotle says famously. And that means that to be happy, to be self-sufficient, is not to be isolated or to have just enough to live on by yourself. It means to be able to share your life with friends, with family, with a city that has good laws, understands human nature. And that these things are not optional, but that they are constituents, really, of a life that one would want to call happy, which would be an enviable life, a life that you would choose, that is in some ways blessed. In other words, you have to have all of these ingredients in order to enjoy good fortune as a human being, as a political animal. And you need them also in order to enjoy the greatest of good fortune, which is to live a happy life.
Okay. Then I, we've got all the ingredients here for the happy life. So I, I want to go through them because Aristotle tells me, just be a moral person, and that'll take you a long way. There, okay. Well, how am I a moral person? What do I have to do?
When we think of morality, we tend to think of limits on action. Thou shalt not, you know, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not commit adultery, and so forth. And Aristotle is aware of all that. But for him, morality is, and happiness building on morality, is a kind of fulfillment. So it's using all of your faculties in a moral way and in a way that makes for a happy life. So it's being courageous, it's being moderate, it's being generous, it's being just, it's practicing all of the virtues. And that takes great effort.
The twist that he introduces is that morality, virtue, this whole new domain of human excellence, is essentially attainable by habit. You can habituate yourself, or you can be habituated. Since most of us don't do it to ourselves, it's our parents, it's the authorities in the schools and in the city, or whatever that help us along in this way. But by going through the motions, committing just acts, one becomes just. And that means that it's really open to a lot of human types, a lot of strivers of one kind or another who want to lift themselves up from unhappiness, but also from, you might say, the most vulgar kinds of pleasure and activity.
Right. This would seem to be an inversion of what a lot of people think about being a good person. They'll say, look, I abuse all sorts of drugs, I cheat on my girlfriend all the time, I'm a complete degenerate, but deep down, I'm a really good person. You know, you don't understand. All of the things that I do might not be great, but deep down, I'm a good person. Aristotle says, no, the morality, the virtue is in the habit.
Yes. And it's not merely enough to do a good action. The most striking part, going back through the Nicomachean Ethics to me, in the year of our Lord 2023, is the four types of virtuous person, I guess you'd say, that he describes. The first is not virtuous at all, the self-indulgent person, who does bad things and he's totally unrepentant, and he gets a real kick out of it. Next up is the incontinent person, the person who knows that he should be doing good things, but he keeps doing bad things.
Right, right. Then the continent person, who knows he should be doing good things and basically avoids doing the bad things, but only through a real exercise of will and endurance.
Yes. And then, I think for most people, that's where they think it stops. They don't realize that there's this extra category. Frankly, even I, in my wayward youth, didn't realize there was this category of person called the virtuous person, who does good things and enjoys doing the good things.
Right. I'm not sure I even thought that was possible. And that's why pleasure is attached to virtue and to happiness. The test of when you are genuinely virtuous and not just going through the motions because someone else is making you or will punish you if you don't play fair, is that you take pleasure in playing fair. You're not forced to do it. It's not the pain attending playing unfairly that you fear. It's that you wouldn't dream of playing dishonestly because you enjoy playing honestly. You pride yourself on playing honestly. You hold yourself to those high standards, and you have, in a way, taught yourself to enjoy it, even when you lose. Playing fair, playing well, brings pleasure.
And that's virtue. This is a theme that I notice throughout the whole book, which is that whenever Aristotle asks, okay, well, what's the best way to exercise this kind of virtue, whatever it is, courage, this or that, what is courage, what is justice, what is it? Very often tends to be not one extreme or another, but the mean.
Moral virtue, you can say there are three components of it. One is precisely the mean, which we'll come to. The other is habituation, which we were talking about. And the third is that it's voluntary. That is, that you can choose it. You can choose to act virtuously or viciously. And that it is, it's possible, it's attainable for more or less ordinary people, or at least many ordinary people, if not most. But the mean is a very useful teaching device before you're virtuous. And the philosophy of the mean is simply that, you know, Aristotle describes it for each of the moral virtues that he talks about, and there are 10, 10 to 12 of them, depending on how you count friendship. There's a golden mean in the middle, which is the virtue. And then there's an excess and a defect, which are the vices. So the virtue, let's say, is courage. Too much of the spirited bravery that would be a virtue is the vice of rashness or audacity. Too little of it is cowardice.
So, in a way, this is because the virtue varies according to the situation that you're in. This is another thing that people will find odd, perhaps, about Aristotle's account of virtue. There aren't categorical imperatives. There aren't hard and fast rules. There are no formulas, exactly. The virtuous thing to do will depend on the circumstances. Under a certain set of circumstances, let's say you're a soldier on the battlefield, the courageous thing to do is charge the enemy and die bravely. But under a slightly different set of circumstances, the brave thing to do might be to surrender if your unit is defending an indefensible position and that has no strategic significance, and the enemy is mild enough to perhaps treat you well and so forth. It would be vicious of you to waste the lives of yourself and your men. It would be courageous to risk the disapprobation of people back home by surrendering, but it might be the moral thing to do under the circumstances. Similarly, what is it to be generous or liberal? It depends on the circumstance. I mean, it's possible to give wrongly, to the wrong person, for the wrong reason, in the wrong way. Generous acts may seem very ungenerous depending on the circumstances.
So what do you need to know? You need to have experience. This is Aristotle's way to explain it. You need to have experience with doing generous or courageous acts many times in many different sets of circumstances. And in that way, you learn to think morally, that is, to think prudently. Because it takes a while, but in Book Six, one of the Ethics, one discovers that you need a little bit of intellectual virtue to be morally virtuous. You don't need theoretical wisdom, you don't need philosophy as such, but you need prudence, you need practical wisdom, which comes from experience itself. It is shaped by having to choose many times in different moral circumstances.
Well, I love this. It keeps recurring in the book where he says, it would be ridiculous to try to arrive at a principle with a degree of precision that is not appropriate to it.
That's right. So you have a certain degree of precision expected. And one of the examples he uses is the way that a geometer looks at a right angle and the way that a carpenter looks at a right angle. They're both looking at the same thing, but for different purposes. And so you might have extreme precision for the geometer. The carpenter doesn't need that. It wouldn't be appropriate for the carpenter to waste his labor on that kind of degree of precision. So too, in the moral life, and so too in politics.
Yes. This is what Leo Strauss called the wise inexactness of Aristotle. Life is full of inexact choices to be made. You can't reason mathematically or scientifically or deductively in all circumstances, and certainly not in moral circumstances. And so you have to acquire experience at looking at the finding the mean in many different situations and figuring out, in this situation, it's courageous to fight to the end, but in another situation, it may be courageous to surrender rather than waste the lives of your men.
Probably the most important part, well, which is pretty important, but at least one of the two most important parts of this book for a modern-day reader, and most shocking, I think, is on friendship. Because you see everywhere throughout all of social science, which I generally doubt, but I'll cite it when it serves my purposes, we see this collapse in friendship. We see people are lonely, they're alienated. Collapse in marriage, for that matter, but especially in friendship, especially among men. A lot of people say, I don't have any friends. And Aristotle reminds us, many people today don't even know what a friend is. And he identifies three kinds of friends. Frankly, only two of which most people seem to be aware of. So he talks about friendship based on utility, a friend who's useful to you. Like, and this can be like a business associate, or it could be someone who's cooking you enjoy. Also, friendship based upon a virtue, which is sort of the highest category. And friendship based on pleasure. And for him, the steadiest, the most constant and satisfying form of friendship is among good men and women, good human beings with one another. And that's a friendship based upon virtue, and in which your friend is really another self to you. I mean, it's more important, really, than justice, he says, because people who have friendship don't need justice.
And so, in a political, and this will also strike modern Americans, perhaps, as hopeless or too hopeful, and that is, you know, a city strives for civic friendship, ought to strive for civic friendship even more than for justice. Because you want citizens to love one another, in some sense, and not simply to respect one another's rights or your obligations to them. You want to befriend them, you want to enjoy them, and they you. And that, I think, as I say, may strike people as too hopeful in divided times. But it isn't really, because I think the disappointment that Americans feel at the divisions in our own society, reflected difference in opinion about what justice is, but more than that, it just reflects a kind of alienation from each other and impatience and otherness in one another, which we experience as very unpleasant and very difficult to handle. And that's because we are meant to be more than simply just to one another in a civic sense, and especially within families, of course, as you mentioned. And you see the same kind of collapse within the family, and the same kind of creeping legalism and dryness, I suppose.
So part of that is because people view friendship as just you and your college buddies going out and getting hammered at the bar, you know, pleasure or of utility. Well, so and so is he's going to get me a really nice business deal, he's my friend. But for that third one, the true friendship, which is only possible between good men, bad men cannot have a good friendship. Is it possible that that has also collapsed because people now doubt the very existence of the good?
That may be a component of it. I suspect that there are other more mundane ones, though. For example, for Aristotle, really good friends have to spend time together. You have to know each other in order to trust each other. And in order to, as you come to know each other, you sort of discover deeper similarities and deeper affinities. Modern people, Americans in particular, are so busy and they move around so much that many of our friendships are electronically maintained now, over Zoom or the phone or something. But that is, from Aristotle's point of view, very thin gruel for friendship. It's not enough, really, to sustain friendship. There's something about us that is naturally face-to-face and involves living with the other person, seeing them more often than once a year, or even once a month, probably. So we've become so mobile and so commercial in many ways that we don't invest in friends. And our life is not built to make friendship easier. It really makes friendship harder. And that's a terrible thing to overcome.
I think there's one more word that I have. It's not a chapter, it's not a book. There's one word I have to ask you about. It's this word that crops up, Eudaimonia, which is the word for happiness, which is what the whole book is about, right? I don't have ancient Greek, but is that does that refer to a demon?
Yes, it literally means good demon. I've never met one of those in my life, but it's what happiness is. So it emphasizes the blessed component, that is, that you need a certain good fortune, divine favor, if you want to call it that, that makes you healthy, that gives you these bodily and external goods in addition to goods of the soul, which are important for happiness. Stoics and all sorts of later philosophers would maintain that happiness is entirely a state of mind. And so the famous Stoic paradox, you know, the philosopher who is under torture and in body is racked with pain, nevertheless is entirely unhappy through this experience. And Aristotle would say that's crazy. No, because happiness is your state of mind and character, but it's also the state of your body and the real goods of like health and freedom from pain and friends and other things which go into happiness. And you can't neglect that exterior component of it, which centers in basically a kind of, you know, thank God I'm healthy, thank God I have these great friends. And this is what I love so much about Aristotle, maybe more than any other philosopher, is he doesn't allow his ideas to run away with him and take him away from reality. So, you know, he won't say you don't need any money, you just need to contemplate. He'll say, well, a little money's good. You don't need to worry about your body, just have your head in the sky and fall into a ditch somewhere.
No, no, that's right. And he even, on the question of money, so he has, he divides generosity into two virtues. One is ordinary generosity, you know, liberality. But there's also what he calls magnificence. And this is a virtue that requires bucks, big, I mean, a big gift, not podcast money, we're talking real money to be capable of that. This is very anti-Christian, of course, from the Christian point of view, the widow's mite is more valuable than the millions given by the rich guy. But from Aristotle's point of view, very practical, and as you say, common sense point of view, if you can give, you know, a building or a college or something, if you have the resources to do that, that's a special subdivision of generosity, which is meant to be impressive. It's meant, in a social animal, to impress other social animals, but also to do good. It's not just to be a peacock or something like that. It might have that effect, but it is appropriate to the public. And so when you pick up the tab, that's generous, that's liberal. When you donate the new library, that's magnificent.
And improves our good or is conducive to our good because we're the political animal.
That's right. That's right. It's a hopeful note to end on that one could have this clash of things and not have the society completely fall apart. Little tough looking around our society right now, which seems to have forgotten a lot of these lessons. But perhaps then it's a reason for people to pick up the book, because as you say, he keeps coming back to, look, this is natural, this is the way man is. This is even in the examples where he says, this is the nature of courage, or this is the nature of that, or this is why such and such virtue is better than another one, he says, you might disagree with me here, but you know, come on, you know, it's true. And he mixes what I guess we would call theoretical knowledge, book learning, with common sense.
Yes, to all throughout the book. It's a great compendium of common sense and uncommon sense. So it is a very humanizing book and a wonderful book to read at any age, I think.
Now, before I let you go, I've got to ask you one last question. Question that he kind of tacks on there, and the whole, the whole book, he's zigging, and then I get a little zag at the end, which is the book seems so practical, it seems so political, it seems so active. And then right by the end, he says, but the best life is the contemplative life. Where'd that come from?
When you, as Aristotle does, basically invent the category of practice and practical life, and practical virtue, morality and moral virtue, all of that fits together. You allow moral virtue to be more moral, and you allow intellectual virtue to become more intellectual than Plato allows them, because he tries to make them one thing. Virtue equals knowledge for him. But the downside of virtue equals knowledge is that it destroys indignation. And the advantage of Aristotle is that it allows you to preserve indignation by saying there are things he should have known that he is responsible for not knowing. And they're not necessarily philosophical things at all. It's many common sense things about the equality and the character of other human beings, visa vie yourself, and what justice is, and what moderation is, needless to say. And these things have a kind of integrity that Aristotle is trying to establish and preserve. But the same time, intellectual activity has a kind of integrity which applies to questions that are not subject to human variation and human change. So astronomy, cosmology, physics, these are realms of theoretical wisdom about subjects that are not changeable, like happiness and morality and action of human beings.
And so, partly as a result of this, when you say some of those are changeable and some are not, meaning my moral state, my whether I'm virtuous or whether I'm happy, that could change day by day. The stars are fixed in the way that they move. Yes. And so, morality is a practical science because it aims at action, things that you will choose to do or not choose to do. But the stars, the laws of physics, one might say, these things are not changeable by our choice. We have to understand them. And understanding them means, in effect, contemplating them. And that's contemplative virtue, which in its own sphere is sovereign. But human action, morality, the happy life, these are things that are within our power to affect by our choices.
That makes sense. And speaking of the heavens, you even think of the vision that we have of God, which I think Aristotle understood glimpses of, even though he lived a long time ago in a very Greek pagan culture. But God, you know, doesn't go and mow the lawn. God contemplates. And so if we were to suggest that the more more and mere human endeavors were somehow greater than that, we would be making ourselves higher than God.
Yes, that's his view at least. God is not conscious of particulars. He's concerned with things that are always and everywhere the same. Human beings are, by virtue of being human beings, we live in a world of particulars as well as a world of unchanging scientific truth. And so we have to be concerned with particulars of action and character and so forth.
The Christian God is being an otherworldly God who condescends to enter this world, begotten, consubstantial with God the Father, and fully human as well.
Well, I suppose we might have to have you back on to go over that book. You know, that's a much bigger book. That's a much bigger book than this. There's a lot of good stuff in here. You know, what has been conducive to my happiness, Charles? This very conversation. Thank you for coming on the show.
Thank you. It's good to have you as a friend. It is truly a good and truly virtuous aspect of my life is your friendship. And your viewership. Thank you so much for watching the show. I'm Michael Nolles. This is the Book Club. We'll see you next time.
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