Self-help from Aristotle

Self help from Aristotle

In my on/off time as a student of philosophy, I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with Aristotle. When an undergraduate, I think I avoided him altogether. Later, as a “mature” MA student, I quickly decided to concentrate on other areas of the Ethics syllabus, but not without some preliminary grapplings with lectures and texts concerning the great man.

A big part of the problem, for countless students including me, is that Aristotle’s surviving works, in Ancient Greek, are incomplete or corrupted – making it difficult to trace consistent structures and arguments.

This means that Aristotelian scholars are an elite and squabbling bunch, standing out even in the field of academic philosophy. You’ve got to know Ancient Greek; you’ve got to deal in minute linguistic and semantic analyses; you’ve got to expound Aristotle’s true (according to you) theory and then do conventional critical analysis.

When all this baggage is brought into the lecture theatre, or on to the textbook page, it is daunting for the student, even if (like me) they’ve had some schooling in Greek.

Indeed, my sense is that some lecturers take a mildly sadistic pleasure in talking to the educationally deficient about Aristotle. They scribble (in Greek lettering) key concepts on the whiteboard; and then, with wolfish grin, they list the several ways, all subtly but vitally different, in which they can be translated and understood (a good twist being that they can be rendered differently in different contexts – according to the academic in question).

Take Aristotle’s fundamental concept of eudaimonia, which, according to Aristotle is the state of the life worth living. Does it mean “happiness”, “fulfilment”, “flourishing”, or, more banally, “contentment”?

Briefly, Aristotle wants humans to live “excellently” and  “virtuously” , guided as to both by “practical wisdom” (another concept to be unpacked in a philosophical pass-the-parcel,  linguistically and conceptually). And in all things, moderately…

 Aristotle’s views on virtue on the whole provide an underpinning for many common sense personal moral intuitions held in the Western world. The problem is whether that’s enough. Should moral and political theorists provide more robust and comprehensive standards- such as morally binding universal rules (Kant) or the promotion of general welfare or happiness (Utilitarianism or consequentialism)?

Aristotle’s ethical system promotes individual moral character, but largely leaves open the kind of world the moral characters inhabit (though he stresses the social virtues of friendship, generosity, and especially justice).

These rusty thoughts are prompted by reading that Aristotle is now touted as a self-help guru by a classics scholar from King’s College London (Aristotle’s Way, by Edith Hall).

I don’t comment on the book, but helpfully the author has written a summary  (aeon.co) of her argument. Aristotle’s message is “excellence” – develop your capacities- tempered by moderation. And train yourself, and your youngsters, to the habitual exercise of the virtues. And off you go, to eudaimonia (which is not so much a goal as the state one finds oneself in by exercising virtuous habits and doing one’s best).

This is everything and nothing. I, among countless others, have no quarrel with cultivation of the virtues, or striving (often failing) after excellence. But so much is pre-supposed – especially that the general principles governing life and society are right. In Aristotle’s time, those general principles, which he accepted as the norm, included the permissibility of enslaving non-Greeks and the moral inferiority of women..

Tellingly, Hall says that says that Aristotle’s philosophy is available to all, from capitalist to communist. And, I would suggest, to reactionary elitists, even racists, notwithstanding that she quotes Marx as an admirer. I’m sure that there were members of the Hitler Youth that were paragons of many of the virtues.

One suspects that there are, or until recently, were many smug Aristotelians amongst conservative scholars at Oxbridge high tables, deploring the unvirtuous manners and mores of lesser folk.

The question must be put: “Aristotle and…?” – where the “…” indicates a political or philosophy that may take many different paths.

June 2018