It seems to me that this either underemphasizes the importance of happiness or assumes that happiness will be an inevitable byproduct of virtue; even if we define happiness very broadly to include things like "satisfaction" or a "sense of purpose".
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.
The article says directly: “One might even suffer greatly and still live a virtuous—that is: a good—life. When Aristotle speaks of a “happy” life, he means a fulfilled or flourishing life rather than a pleasurable one.”
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.
Idea: Web page of every phrase in (Koine) greek that meant different thing to the ancient great philosophers than in English language today. This'd help to get a good picture of the Greeks at once for one usually stumbles upon the "different interpretations" slowly.
To go even farther, virtue, to any notable extent, only accumulates under hardship.
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.
Yes, Aristotle was born into a more privileged family, but I'm not sure if it's accurate to say that he was rich. However, his financial conditions and the fame that his life's work brought him seem to have had the opposite effect of what you suggested. There is a painting by Rembrandt that represents exactly this. The painting depicts Aristotle with one hand holding a chain of gold and the other hand resting on a bust of Homer. This represents his internal struggle between embracing his eternal legacy, like Homer, or embracing momentary pleasures and riches.
Statements that end in "nothing more" are almost always incorrect. The only way one could make such a statement with total certitude would be to be omniscient, as the phrase implies an exhaustive understanding of all possible facts.
Epictetus, a Stoic philosopher and proponent of Aristotelian virtue ethics, was literally a slave. Some ideas, particularly the best ones, aren't subject to class politics.
> Epictetus, a Stoic philosopher and proponent of Aristotelian virtue ethics, was literally a slave. Some ideas, particularly the best ones, aren't subject to class politics.
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.
Yeah an aristocrat greek being slave in Rome doesn't change his high social class status. It just means he worked for room and board for a while. Often as teacher and administrative leaders. Anything written by anyone before the XIX century CE can be assumed to having been written by a high social class individual.
Happiness and sadness are emotions - inherently transient.
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"
> It seems to me that this either underemphasizes the importance of happiness or assumes that happiness
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?
Happiness is not the goal. You can't control when the mind will be happy, how long that happiness lasts, or even the intensity of the happiness. Instead, the goal should be something we do have more control over. Our reactions to experiences. We can train ourselves to be non reactive no matter what emotions or experiences arise. Non reaction here means mindful observation without being moved to act. That way action becomes a choice rather than an automatic response.
It's good to try to boil Aristotle down to some topological order, because it is latent there.
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.
> We cannot study rules for proper behaviour. Instead, we must train our character through habituation to find the right mean appropriate to the circumstances.
> 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.
Next best, someone who knows
how to take good advice when he hears it.
So, if you're clueless yourself,
and unwilling to listen to others,
taking to heart what they say -
then, sorry, you're pretty much hopeless."
- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, Chapter 4, 1095b
Maybe the first category needs some explanation. I have a realtive that relies on his own understanding... Way too much, to the point that he assumes to be right too often and so is mostly unable to listen to advice. Does he fall in the first or in the last category? I would put him in the last, but note that the heart of the problem is relying to one own understanding without considering the possibility of being wrong sometimes.
The key to understanding this properly is that the “understanding” in the first category is taken to be right, good understanding, which by stipulation your relative does not have. When Aristotle means someone’s own opinion, he uses a different word like “doxa”, how things appear to people, which is translated as belief or opinion.
He may well mean a mechanic qua mechanic is not capable or practising virtue -- not a mechanic qua human being.
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'm actually very much in agreement with that point.
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.
Mechanics in Ancient Greece meant the study of mechanical physics. So essentially scientists. If your focus is on the material world (material here being ‘matter’ not consumer goods) then you necessarily see science as a higher aim than virtue.
Stoics believe in the four cardinal virtues: courage, justice, wisdom, and moderation. I think they're a good starting point for character development, and a lifetime of work on their own.
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.
I can get angry at the drop of a hat, and I may be in the right, but my anger may not be proportionate. So for me, the action is to say sorry and explain what else happened that annoyed me. Also, it pays to fix or accept whatever made me angry.
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.
All those times you are confronted with choices that boil down to "I should do this, but I want to do that..."
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.
Nope, not what I was saying. I'm saying that distinguishing right from wrong is usually the easy part of the process. It's the 'draw two circles' step.
Not deceiving yourself about the result is the hard part. That's a psychological problem, not a philosophical problem.
I read nicomachean ethics, can I skip the article?
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.
> My criticism of Aristotle: Living the golden mean, like a happy person isnt going to help when your country is invaded.
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.
There's a peril in translating the Greek word that is often used by Aristotle and the other Virtue Ethicists -- eudaimonia -- into happiness. Happiness in English often maps to a transient & discrete emotional state, whereas eudaimonia is a much more expansive conception of flourishing and fulfillment that is not as simply as "feeling" happy or joyful all the time. Indeed, in virtue ethics, it is sometimes possible to endure hardship and feel quite negative emotions while experience eudaimonia (at least in the Stoic version of this branch of philosophy).
Prudence is the virtue that allows us to see what to do in the infinite and unique situations that present themselves to us each day. This will always and everywhere mean sacrificing a lesser good for a greater one. This can be something as trivial as saying "I choose to forego the pleasure of this ice cream for the sake of my health", or something as life-changing as "I choose to give up this career because it's making me unhealthy." The good choice is always what leads to 'happiness', which is perhaps better translated as beatitude or fulfillment.
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.
this reminds me that stoicism was written by leaders in govt and didn't consider classism or economic disparity. Sure, they might have started from broke, but they were important.
Aristotle's conception of the goodness of a thing (which is not convincingly conveyed by the author) is essentially normatively neutral; a good knife qua knife for Aristotle is one that cuts well as a good nuclear weapon is one which is destructive. Using a nuclear weapon might not be good but just as a gun might be well-designed without being well-used I don't think it is too normatively concerning to be able to identify something as being a good example of its kind (a well-designed nuclear weapon), though I could be wrong!
A nuke can be good considered in itself (effective at leveling a city), and bad considered in relation the person who presses the button and thereby commits mass murder.
It is the latter that makes nuking a city a bad deed.
The US is apparently retaining components of some large H-bomb designs for "potential planetary defense purposes" - wouldn't that be a "good" function?
"The ultimate goal of a nuclear a weapon (as of any weapon) is to keep peace."
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."
One thing you have to notice is the centrality of the nature of a thing, which is to say its telos, or end. Fulfillment is, after all, defined by our nature; it is a matter of proceeding from potential to actuality, as determined by our nature. What is good advances a person according to one's nature (in our case, human nature), what is bad acts against it. Telos, or finality, also gives morality its proper and objective ground: what is morally right or wrong follows, ultimately, from one's nature. Since we are humans, we are therefore persons, which is to say animals who can understand their actions and choose between apprehended alternatives, and therefore moral agents. We must therefore choose to act in accord with our nature as free and rational agents, which is to say according to right reason. Our rationality allows us to tackle the question of what it means to be human and to therefore determine what is good.
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.
I am not compelled by this. To the best of my ability to understand the world in which I find myself, it seems unfortunately to be the case that there are no human beings as such, no persons, no moral agents. What I see around me are assemblages of interacting quantum fields which share no fundamental nature with one another except that they happen to be arranged in similar (but not remotely identical or fundamentally related) shapes. Given that there are no human beings there cannot be a single human nature and thus I can say nothing about whether a person's behavior is good or bad in reference to such.
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.
And yet, you also have the experience of existing and the experience of thinking and the experience of making decisions. I think this is evidence that your analysis is missing something. (And before you just dismiss this as wrong, note that an incorrect model generally fails at the edges, so these quiet discrepancies are important hints.) If you focus on the components, how can you see the higher-order whole? If you can only see cells, it is hard to perceive the body. If you can only see the assembly code it is hard to grok the algorithm, let alone the purpose for which the algorithm is used.
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.
One of my core criticisms to Plato and later Aristotle is not a criticism of Aristotle qua Aristotle, but in the way people give this almost religious reverence to the particular words they use. As if by saying that
>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.
Not the parent, but as I understand it the post is saying that morality is not defined by outcome, but rather by consistency of the object's purpose. A sentient chair choosing to fall apart when you sit on it is being "immoral", opposed to its purpose.
> 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.
a) Yeah, that's fair. Everything I know about Eastern and Russian Orthodoxy could fill 2 post-it notes, if I write big.
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
Is a happy life a good life? I'm really not sure, but pursuit of the former is more of a modern conception of value as far as I can tell.
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?
> but pursuit of the former [ happiness ] is more of a modern conception ..
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.
I would add optional 4) for those who like some improvement in life (and who doesn't) - recognize those few important moments/periods when situation comes around that can change rest of your life, or walk towards it and create one yourself. Work hard with it, achieve what you desire to, and come back to more, even better chill.
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.
I think it's fundamentally important to care deeply about some things e.g. your craft. As you tend to find joy when you're deep in flow state.I'd also add:
Arguing is enjoyable and helps build the foundation of your beliefs IMO. Where people go wrong is expecting the other person to be converted to your beliefs or swayed by your argument. Even given the exact same data, evidence, and information, people can naturally and logically come to different conclusions. And ultimately, people will choose to believe (or not) what they want.
There's really something quite magical when you're having a debate with someone with vastly different views but they're reasonable and you both find common ground. Probably a good indication of partner compatibility - I don't think it's healthy if you and your partner have exactly the same views.
It certainly reflects my experience. A lot of my friends I people I will have arguments, frequently on topics that make people emotional and on which we have very different views: politics (including Brexit!), religion, gender identity, and so on.
On the other hand that was not true of my EX-wife.
You're right, but sometimes you gotta realise you're being trolled or the person you're arguing with is not arguing in good faith. Maybe that's what he meant.
I've found that caring deeply about one's craft leads to being unhappy when the craft isn't perfect, unhappy with teammates who don't care as much as they do, unhappy with an industry that doesn't focus on the craft, unhappy with the customer who doesn't respect the end result, etc. That leads to conflict, and then nobody is happy. You can still care without caring deeply.
Yeah, I see a lot of what OP recommended as strategies to suppress and numb, which I think don't work very well for also having passion, drive, and fun.
Indeed, if apathy is the absence of caring, and caring is part of both love and hate, then I don't think any of these are opposites of each other, they are merely things that can not co-exist.
I often wonder if apathy is just the belief that one is without love, not actually being without love. I think we die pretty fast if we don't have love and attachment to things, even at the most basic level of air, water, food, and shelter.
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
There are so many good (non-mainstream) tech articles to share. A lot of them are not repetitive. A lot are shared here every day. Yet, for some reason, people decide to share these self-help low effort articles on HN. Just make some "news.selfhelp.how2behappy.com" website.
I think knowledge isn’t something that accumulates—each generation discards some old things and discovers some new.
The old stuff is still there of course, but it’s not a part of the societal discourse or understanding and so is more inert information than knowledge.
Nietzsche, in his book Beyond Good and Evil, says that Plato is the beginning of a great decline, responding with his tragic view: 'And who said that man is capable of knowing the truth? [...a long waste of time follows...]'. I recommend looking into the discussion of universals, as I understand that much of the disagreement stems from this point.
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
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.
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.
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.
At what point does the reader's interpretation stop being something in the vicinity of what was intended by the author, and instead becomes mostly the product of our own personal creativity? Sure, you can argue about the need of analogies and multi-layered texts, but if you provide me with a guide on how to do something, and your assertions are vague and questionable, how much of the final moral of the story is of my own doing?
> 2400 years ago Aristotle found out how to be happy.
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.
You're splitting hairs and attacking choices of words that were not made by Aristotle, but the author in trying to summarize Aristotle. You need to put away this sort of sophistry if you want to engage with philosophy.
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> > 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).
Dogs think. Someone not having this basic knowledge of the world is surprising.
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.
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.
> 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.
If your definition of "think" doesn't directly describe the cognitive processes that happen when humans process and react from the inputs they get, then what does the word mean to you? If you don't agree that humans think, then I think we just need another word. But that other word, applies to both humans and dogs and many other living things.
In this context I'm trying to capture something like reasoning, λόγος.
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.
While solipsism itself is a difficult (and arguably pointless) position to attack, it has been my experience that arguments invoking it are often vulnerable to the charge of doing so inconsistently.
Consciousness for me is a more sophisticated process than "simpler" thinking.
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.
May we stand judged by our own actions and words and not by SEO posts portraying them :p Aristotle is well worth reading for someone interested in philosophy, but he himself did not claim to have discovered how to be happy (he thought of himself as explicating and systematizing what everyone thinks about happiness), his notion of telos (poorly translated as 'function') is not subject to your rightly raised objection, and, though he did believe that humans are distinguished from non-human animals by possession of a rational faculty, he thought we shared with non-human animals the capacity to feel.
Aristotle lives in the old versions of the Earth. The outdated concepts may not stand up to modern thinking, but are sufficient for dealing with a simple life. Unfortunately, most people's lives are not simple.
I think in many parts most people's lives are not simple because they engage with them through muddled and complex intellectual frameworks using 16 letter words to explain 3-5 letter word concepts. You'd be surprised how much modern life begins to make sense viewed through the framework of antique philosophy.
Ancient societies were different. A male citizen from the aristocracy could lead a slow leisurely life, gathering with like-minded citizens on the agora and talking for hours, enjoying the finer things in life like wine and sporadic sexual contacts, taking part in sports competitions.
The "ancient wisdom" we consume now is coming from that segment of the Greek and Roman societies.
It discredits them. Imagine the modern version – a privileged upper-middle class person with an expensive upbringing and education talking about stoicism ala Ryan Holiday and hard work. Their version of stoicism is most likely about not worrying of the fluctuations of stock values. An economically disenfranchised man's stoicism is about seeing their health degrade.
I don't think this is a useful mindset. We judge ideas based on their merits, not who came up with them. You can throw these accusations at modern figures like Marx and Engels as well. They were very much coddled and wealthy, far removed from the workaday concerns of everyday life.
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.
For example, our concept of 'work most of your time to afford food and place to live' for Aristotle would translate to a single word 'slave'. Good for him that he didn't have to do it and had slaves working for him instead.
We are forced to make our life complex. You can't deny the fact that the society we are living in has evolved. Of course one still has the oppurtunity to get rid of it and live in a cave, but how many people are doing this?
You are born into a society with certain expectations and customs. Choosing the slow and simple path turns you into a social recluse with little opportunities for contacts and further development. You may be reading Plato and Aristotle and have no idea what's currently happening in your neighbourhood because of lack of social contacts.
The path to transformation should be the collective consensus towards new visions of society, not some individual acts of virtue signalling.
> You are born into a society with certain expectations and customs. Choosing the slow and simple path turns you into a social recluse with little opportunities for contacts and further development. You may be reading Plato and Aristotle and have no idea what's currently happening in your neighbourhood because of lack of social contacts.
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.
You will need a percise definition of virtue and end up using the muddled complex intellectual frameworks. You may have no problem understanding the virtue concept with simple words because you grew up with it, but people with different environments may understand a different thing.
They may, but the wonderful thing about discourse is that in most cases you don't need to rebuild everything from raw signals processing on up. You just need to find the first common layer of agreement and build from there.
I think Aristotle would be of the opinion that most people's lives could in fact be quite simple, but many choose to complicate because it makes them feel important, because they are confused about what they want out of life, or both.
>>> The outdated concepts may not stand up to modern thinking
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
Sorry, I typed some words but in the end found I can't do it better than GPT and decide not to post them. The quoted comment describes a fact that various other philosophers raised different views.
Most of the arguments can be seen as overthinking. This is how we make our life worse.
One interpretation was that he choose his death wisely. He was old and tired and wanted to go a with a splash. In his society, legacy mattered a lot. If that's the case, he did fine.
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.
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.