Aristotle and Virtue – Nicomachean Ethics

So, I’m delving once again into Aristotle, both for personal enrichment and to better understand some of his finer points, and it never amazes me just how smart this long-dead Greek was.  I’ll probably write multiple posts on Aristotle, so I’ll start by noting that his resume (he was the teacher/tutor to three Greek kings:  Alexander the Great, Ptolemy, and Cassander) is unimportant to me.  That was as much about his position as a member of the aristocracy (and his father’s position as the physician to a king) as it was to ability.

I’ll launch this with some of his broadest thoughts on happiness and virtue and ask how it applies to everyday life.  It’s difficult to try to take Aristotle on a particular subject and separate it from his larger philosophy because his thoughts on something specific tend to have some context from larger philosophical views.  For example, before one can understand Aristotle on virtue, one has to understand the Aristotelian notion (maybe doctrine is a better term) of the soul.  It is not like the modern day notion of some silky, translucent ‘spirit’ that hovers briefly over us when we croak and then floats away (or sticks around to haunt your friend who’s trying to schtup your girlfriend or talks with Whoopi Goldberg, like in “Ghost”).  No, Aristotle’s “soul” is much more akin to our notion of the “mind” or maybe “consciousness.”

Additionally, Aristotle distinguished between various class of virtue:  moral virtue and intellectual virtue.  I’ll talk about the moral, although some of the intellectual will likely creep in.  But I want to start with something that seems to me to be fundamental to Aristotle:  the focus on the theoretical not simply for “knowledge” (so you can quote a dead Greek guy and sound smart), but for its utility in day to day life.  To wit:

“Our present study is not, like other studies, purely theoretical in intention; for the object of our inquiry is not to know what virtue is but how to become good, and that is the sole benefit of it. We must, therefore, consider the right way of performing actions, for it is acts that determine the character of the resulting moral states.”

So, how great is this?  A philosopher who says that his purpose is not to help you get through the mid-term or final, but so that you can be a good human being… what a novel concept.  Now, some will say that all philosophers and philosophy aim at arriving at some conclusion about how we should live our lives, but my rejoinder to that would be to look at a modern college philosophy class and see what manner of garbage is taught – much of which is entirely irrelevant and seems to be nothing more than an exercise in mental masturbation.  I’ll take my Aristotle, thank you very much.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (found online here) has a phenomenal explanation for the novice or intermediate reader on how Aristotle gets to discussing “virtue” by starting with defining what is “good” – or really, the “highest good” – for a human being and how it must consist of something that is essential to our natures as humans – as distinct from other critters roaming the Earth.  I’m going to table this for today and continue it in later posts because what is “essential” to our natures as human beings is a matter worth discussing in detail…  Plus, I’ve got work to do and errands to run and a life to lead, like you.