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 The outdated concepts may not stand up to modern thinking, but are sufficient for dealing with a simple life.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.
