The Art of Manliness - #515： Aristotle's Wisdom on Living the Good Life

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.140 What does it mean to live a good life? How can we achieve that good life? These are questions

00:00:16.000 the Greek philosopher Aristotle explored over 2000 years ago in his Nicomachean Ethics. And

00:00:20.620 my guest today argues that these insights Aristotle uncovered millennia ago are still

00:00:24.660 pertinent to us in the 21st century. Her name is Edith Hall. She's a classicist and the author of

00:00:29.020 the book Aristotle's Way, How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life. Today on the show, we discuss

00:00:33.320 what Aristotle thought the good life was and how it's different from our modern conception of

00:00:36.940 happiness. We then dig into how Aristotle believed the cultivation of virtue was a key part of living

00:00:41.700 a flourishing life and why understanding your unique potential and purpose is also important.

00:00:46.060 Edith then shares insights from Aristotle on how to handle misfortune and become a better

00:00:49.620 decision maker, as well as the importance of relationships to human happiness. After the

00:00:53.580 show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash Aristotle. Edith joins me now via

00:00:58.780 clearcast.io.

00:01:06.880 All right, Edith Hall, welcome to the show.

00:01:09.200 Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be with you.

00:01:11.300 So you are a professor of classics at King's College in London, and you just wrote a book.

00:01:16.140 It's called Aristotle's Way, How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life. So how did you first encounter

00:01:22.220 Aristotle and what brought you to write this book about how Aristotle, this over 2000 year old

00:01:27.700 philosopher can still have something to say to us here in the 21st century?

00:01:31.780 Well, it's quite a personal story. I first encountered him as an undergraduate studying

00:01:36.240 classics. I was lucky enough to be told to go off and read him. But I was very much looking at the

00:01:43.140 time for, you know, classic sort of young adult problem of not really knowing what the meaning of

00:01:48.560 life was, and not feeling that I'd got any particular rules to live by. The backstory is

00:01:54.560 that I was brought up in a very, very religious family. My father's an Anglican minister. He's still

00:02:00.460 alive. That would be Episcopalian in the US. And about 13, I just completely stopped believing a word

00:02:07.860 of it. I just could not get in touch with this very strong religious feelings I'd had until then.

00:02:14.040 But this left a terrible void because I was always quite an analytical child. And I started,

00:02:21.000 I didn't know it, but confronting a lot of the major problems in ethical philosophy, like,

00:02:27.320 what's the point in trying to be virtuous if you're not punished if you're not? Or why not just pursue

00:02:36.000 your own self-advantage, given that you can't even prove that anybody else is sort of actually has any

00:02:41.240 feelings. You can't get into another person's consciousness. And this left a terrible void

00:02:46.320 until for about seven years. And I had an unusually, even for a teenager, miserable young adult,

00:02:53.020 young adulthood, trying different religions, trying addictive substances, having too many boyfriends,

00:03:01.200 you name it. And it wasn't until I actually opened a copy of the Nike and McKinnethics when I was about 20,

00:03:07.620 that I realized that there was another way to go at life than religion.

00:03:11.900 Okay. And so, yeah, we're going to talk about Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics. But before we

00:03:16.240 get into that, talk a little bit about Aristotle, because he's an interesting philosopher. He's a

00:03:20.260 student of Plato, but he was doing something, it's different from Plato. Like he talked about the

00:03:25.960 same issues that Plato did, but he has also talked about other things as well.

00:03:30.040 Well, he has a much, much wider remit, much bigger interest in the world as a whole than Plato.

00:03:37.500 Plato was not at all interested in what we call, you know, the sciences, material science, physics,

00:03:43.300 biology, absolutely not. He was only interested in the broad remit of philosophy, which admittedly

00:03:49.380 covers things like politics and aesthetics. But Aristotle was just as important in the history of science

00:03:56.140 as he is in the history of philosophy. And it's, there is no area of human life that he didn't

00:04:02.940 think was worth inquiring into. If you go to university, the foundation texts of many, many

00:04:07.980 disciplines, not just philosophy, are in Aristotle. If you study political science in any sense, you have

00:04:14.860 to read his politics. If you study zoology, you have to read his history of animals and generation of

00:04:20.780 animals. If you read any kind of literature, you have to read his poetics. If you read physics,

00:04:28.360 you have to read his works on cosmology and astronomy. He's, in a sense, a much more important

00:04:35.180 general intellectual than Plato ever was. Having said that, going to Plato's academy for the 20 years

00:04:43.700 of his life between 17 and 37, was undoubtedly what turned him into the thinker he was. I mean,

00:04:50.460 he needed that rigorous training in argumentation. You know, I'm not trying to minimize at all his

00:04:58.500 debt to his great teacher, and he wouldn't want to either.

00:05:02.220 So let's talk about his ethics, because this is the Nicomachean ethics, and he had some other works

00:05:05.780 two on ethics. Basically, his case of how you should live a good life. So what was he trying

00:05:13.180 to do with his ethics? Like, how did he define the good life?

00:05:18.640 Okay, it's a very sort of complicated system in one sense, in that it's a lot of interlocking

00:05:24.820 concepts. It's really a matter of like a giant spider's web, which little bit do you sort of go

00:05:29.960 into to try to build up a picture? But it's also like a spider's web, and that actually there is a

00:05:34.940 real pattern underlying it. So he starts from the premise that man is humans, homo sapiens. He's

00:05:42.020 very, very, very centred on what it is to be a human. He's an animal, all right? We are all animals.

00:05:48.920 And he was the first person ever to say that in world history, which is why Darwin liked him so

00:05:54.740 much. So we're just animals, but we're advanced from animals in that we've got much greater things

00:06:00.840 going on in our brains, like being able to think and rationalise and deliberate, and indeed choose

00:06:07.120 between good and evil, and laugh, and remember and recollect and predict. There's all these things

00:06:14.280 that we can do since the cognitive revolution when we started standing up and talking in about 70,000

00:06:20.420 BCE. So you start with that. Then the next step is that there is no empirical reason whatsoever to

00:06:28.980 think that there's any outside force interested in us, right? He wasn't actually an atheist, but he

00:06:34.240 absolutely didn't believe that there was any God that was interested in how we behaved. He felt that

00:06:40.820 was entirely resting on humans' shoulders. We've got to make all our own decisions. Practical religion

00:06:46.480 did not help with ethics. He took God out of your moral life completely. So we're an advanced animal,

00:06:53.860 animal, and we've got to take responsibility for our own actions. But the plus side of that is that

00:06:59.280 we can actually study how to be happy, which is something that I think all humans desire, how to be

00:07:07.060 happy with these advanced brains that distinguish from animals. We can figure out how to be happy and

00:07:13.160 then put that into action. And it's the results of that question, how can we work and behave and be

00:07:21.480 and think and deliberate in order to maximize our chances of being happy? That constitutes the

00:07:26.820 fundamental question of his ethics. Okay, so there's a lot to unpack there, even now. So first off,

00:07:32.100 let's talk about how did he define happiness? Because I think when people in the 21st century

00:07:36.540 think happiness, they think, oh, I just feel great all the time. I'm smiling, I'm laughing. Is that what

00:07:42.660 Aristotle was talking about when he's talking about happiness? Not at all. In fact, his happy man,

00:07:47.600 though he does like humour, he's all for humour and fun, his happy man might very rarely feel sort

00:07:53.500 of ecstasy or transient joy, or thrill or physical pleasure that unfortunately, I think, tends to get

00:08:01.800 called happiness. You know, you can go for a happy meal, or you can have a cocktail at happy hour, or

00:08:08.480 you have a happy birthday, just one day of your life because you're having fun. Aristotle didn't think

00:08:14.180 that that was true happiness at all. True happiness is a lifetime's project. It's an activity. It's a

00:08:20.740 commitment to trying to figure out ways of life and ways of treating other people that will bring the

00:08:27.040 maximum, I prefer the word felicity, actually, which is the word that Latin scholars use to translate

00:08:34.820 his word for happiness, eudaimonia. Felicity implies something much, much more sustainable,

00:08:40.480 unsustained, and also that needs to have some, you know, work put into it. It's a way of life,

00:08:48.260 not a transient state. The translation that I always like was flourishing, like that's like human

00:08:53.700 flourishing. Yes, I think it works very well for some aspects of it. But I don't think it actually is

00:09:04.080 subjective enough. Flourishing, you could say somebody's flourishing, looking at them from the

00:09:09.020 outside quite objectively. You can say they're healthy, they're strong, they seem to be having

00:09:13.980 fun, they've got enough money, they've got a purpose in life, they've got a successful career,

00:09:19.220 right? You can say a family is flourishing because those basic things are happening. Felicity or eudaimonia

00:09:27.320 to me gets more the sense that this is something that you experience inside your psychic and intellectual

00:09:33.700 self. It is more subjective, it's more personal. You need to have the external flourishing in order to

00:09:39.980 maximally feel Aristotelian happiness. And we'll talk about that later with issues like bad luck and so

00:09:47.180 on. But I prefer felicity or contentedness with, not contented, that implies full satisfaction. I prefer

00:09:57.480 a sense of, you know what, it's the image to me of being able to look yourself in the mirror every night

00:10:02.500 and think, I did all right. It's a sort of sense of satisfaction with your own performance as a

00:10:11.260 human. Okay, so, okay, felicity, that's what we're going for. That's what he's going for. But to

00:10:15.840 understand what felicity is, if you go back to what you said earlier, Aristotle said you have to

00:10:20.800 understand that one, we are animals, but two, we are humans. So like his whole idea is like, okay,

00:10:27.720 to figure out what it means to have felicity as a human being, we got to figure out, okay, what does that

00:10:31.880 look like? So there's like a, I guess that's what's called Aristotelian theology. Is that what it is?

00:10:36.380 Teleology, yes. Teleology, yes. Your telos is your end, which doesn't just mean the sort of temporal

00:10:43.160 point at which you end and you die. It means the purpose. As I always say, why are you on the planet?

00:10:50.160 Why are you here? What is the reason? What it is that you can do for the rest of the human race? And he

00:10:57.260 is very, very outward looking. You can only achieve this form of happiness in interaction

00:11:03.100 with your fellow humans, both those very close to you in your family and your very close friends,

00:11:10.320 but also fellow citizens and indeed fellow world citizens. So it's something that is interactive

00:11:18.000 and community minded. It's not like some Eastern religions sense of a serenity you can achieve

00:11:26.260 on your own on the top of a mountain contemplating nature. You know, it's in interaction with other

00:11:32.520 people. So how did he figure out the telos of a human? Like it was just observation that he made

00:11:40.520 that, okay, this guy looks like he's got felicity. He's happy. So let's see, like, what is he doing

00:11:46.580 that's making him happy? Okay. Well, the telos of all humans, we've all got a broad DNA inherited

00:11:53.960 species telos. I mean, living a life that is reasonably free of misery, of hunger, of need,

00:12:03.300 and full of good relationships and gratifying interchanges. We've all got that together.

00:12:10.300 However, each one of us has a different package of potentialities. It's very closely linked to his

00:12:16.540 idea of your potential. Achieving your telos means also fulfilling your potential that you're born

00:12:24.020 with. And everybody is different. And although some talents do seem to run in families, he's incredibly

00:12:32.900 clear that every individual's got a different set of things that they're good at. And you will never be

00:12:38.160 fully happy if you don't identify what it is that you're good at and work on that to become the very,

00:12:45.940 very best possible version of yourself. So if you are born with the talent to be an excellent gardener,

00:12:52.940 if somebody makes you have a career as a chartered accountant, you won't ever achieve your full

00:12:59.440 potential because you could have been a fabulous gardener. The good thing about this, though, is he says

00:13:05.060 that there is quite an easy way to spot this in children. It means being incredibly careful with

00:13:10.900 the way we raise and educate our young and helping them identify their potential. That's because what

00:13:17.380 people are good at is almost invariably also the thing that gives them the most pleasure.

00:13:22.700 A child who hates maths will never, ever be really good at maths. A child who really doesn't like

00:13:31.060 babies will probably never be a really good parent. A child who loves cooking and loves cooking and food

00:13:38.240 more than anything else really has to be sent to chef school, not to become a violinist, and so on.

00:13:45.320 And he's very sad about the waste of human potential, both in parts of the world where people are so poor

00:13:51.080 that they can only live subsistence lives, which means they can't develop their real human potential

00:13:56.760 beyond supplying their basic physical needs and those of their dependents, but also in developed

00:14:03.060 worlds where people try to force the young into moulds that their potential, you know, to apply a T loss

00:14:11.240 that is not actually the one that is naturally there. And I personally think by far the most important

00:14:17.140 function of education is to help people identify what it is they're good at through pleasure.

00:14:23.820 In Britain, we've got a very great problem with the fact that the national curriculum is cutting out

00:14:29.060 things like music and drama and cookery and learning musical instruments and painting and all these

00:14:37.160 creative things in favour of the core STEM subjects, sort of maths and English and science, which means

00:14:44.940 that vast numbers of people's potential is never getting discovered, which I think is contributing to

00:14:50.460 sort of mass depression.

00:14:51.820 No, that's happening in the United States as well.

00:14:54.000 Yeah.

00:14:54.320 So, okay, there's a general human T loss that we all share because we're all human.

00:14:58.600 Yeah.

00:14:59.020 Then there's like an individual T loss for everyone. Like there's a, we all have potential to do

00:15:03.100 something and in order to figure that out, we have to be kind of self-aware and experiment when we're

00:15:06.960 young and find that thing that brings us pleasure.

00:15:09.240 Yeah.

00:15:09.760 But then another part of Aristotle's ethics is on living the good life is that, okay, you figure out

00:15:15.320 your T loss is, but then in order to achieve that, you need to exercise or practice virtue. Now that word

00:15:24.100 in the 21st century is kind of loaded. What did Aristotle mean by virtue?

00:15:28.560 He means trying to do the right thing. I prefer that as a modern English translation. In all

00:15:40.520 circumstances, try to do the right thing, which would be the one that would be most sort of ethically

00:15:46.980 and morally applauded because it's best for you and for all of those around you. There is general

00:15:55.160 virtue, which is the sort of whole caboodle of doing the right thing. But then he very helpfully,

00:16:01.380 actually in another book, both in the Nicomunic ethics, but actually in more detail in his

00:16:06.080 Eudemian ethics, he actually gives you a sort of questionnaire where you can go through all the

00:16:11.940 human qualities he can think of, all the human characteristics and attributes and tick off what

00:16:16.300 ones do you think you're quite good at already and tick off all the ones that you know need working on.

00:16:22.740 Now you have to do this with extreme honesty or it won't work. If you're in denial about any of your

00:16:30.380 faults, then his recipe for getting to be happy by being a good person and trying to do the right

00:16:37.600 thing by others and yourself all the time won't work. So it requires an extraordinary amount of

00:16:44.860 honesty and it also requires commitment of time. I mean, you actually have to be very analytical about

00:16:51.320 yourself and commit to taking your decisions very, very self-consciously, you know, weighing up why

00:16:57.600 you're doing them and what the different consequences are both for yourself and other people. So it's not

00:17:03.420 an easy route, but in my experience, it is a highly effective one. And he actually gets into like,

00:17:09.780 he lays out specific virtues as sort of examples. Yeah. Yeah. What are some of the virtues that he

00:17:14.080 highlights? Okay. So there's whole ranges of them. There's courage or lack of it.

00:17:20.320 There's your attitude to money. There's kindness. There's politeness. There's generosity. There's

00:17:29.860 self-control with physical desires, anger or mildness or whatever the opposite would be. Apathy.

00:17:39.440 He thinks it's apathy. Revenge. How much is your life spent actually trying to get even with people?

00:17:46.860 Affection for your children? You know, there's a whole list of about 20 basic human qualities,

00:17:54.080 which haven't, to be honest, changed at all. I mean, they're still highly relevant to human life

00:18:00.300 today. And he offers you this questionnaire, which when I first did it, it was, it was, I really did try

00:18:07.940 because I was in a very bad place. I was, I was trying things very seriously. You know, I'd had a very,

00:18:12.860 very bad early adulthood. And, um, I discovered, I think pretty clearly what my own worst faults were,

00:18:20.600 as well as helping to identify my potential. Cause I, I, I realized there were things I was good at.

00:18:26.520 I was good at making people laugh. I was good at, uh, feel good factor. You know, I'm good at cheering

00:18:32.600 people up and I have communication skills. So it's good to identify the ones you think are going okay

00:18:38.660 already. Right. I don't suffer from the opposite of those like extreme shyness or muddled thinking or

00:18:46.660 being a gloomy person who depresses everybody. If you have to work in the same office at them,

00:18:51.520 right. But I do have many, many faults. And for me, the worst ones, uh, actually wild emotional

00:18:59.520 extremes. I got very passionate person and had to learn highly precipitate. That is, I rush into

00:19:05.840 decisions. I'm very impetuous. I love risk. As a young person, I was actually quite addicted to

00:19:13.100 risk-taking, unnecessary and selfish risk-taking. And in particular, I'm highly vindictive. I've

00:19:20.200 had struggled all my life with desire to get revenge, which is a happiness wrecker if ever there

00:19:26.620 was one. And by being very honest with myself about those, I have very definitely improved my own

00:19:34.100 happiness. Now everybody's bunch of good qualities and bad qualities will be different, right? Uh,

00:19:39.600 the trick is to be highly honest with yourself and you do need to have got a little bit of living

00:19:43.180 under your belt before you can do that. I don't think I could have done that with 14.

00:19:46.520 And the other interesting thing about Aristotle's idea of virtue, it's, it's, it's, you know, what the

00:19:51.620 right thing to do is going to be different in every situation. Like, you know, be a courageous act

00:19:57.040 is in one situation might be courageous. Another situation, it might be too timid and another

00:20:02.660 situation, it might be reckless. Context is everything. And this is why, uh, some philosophers

00:20:08.400 call him a moral particularist. That, that, that is a phrase that's used to him because it's the,

00:20:13.120 the particulars of each situation that, uh, throw into relief what the right thing is to do.

00:20:21.240 There's a philosopher called Emmanuel Kant, who came from exactly the opposite direction,

00:20:26.920 which is that you can actually discover universal laws of human behaviour, which you can sort of

00:20:31.340 categorically apply. And Aristotle said, really, this is very, very rare. We've always got to start

00:20:37.860 with the individual circumstances. He doesn't see every virtue as simply having an opposite vice.

00:20:44.020 That is, it's not a binary structure. There's not anger on the one hand, which is bad,

00:20:48.540 which for most Christians there would be. And then there's mildness and gentleness and kindness

00:20:53.880 on the other. That is not how Aristotle goes at it. It's a triple system. It's a triad where the right

00:21:00.980 amount of anger is in the middle, the virtuous anger, and it's got two corresponding vices of either

00:21:08.740 deficiency, not enough, or excess. And this is because we are animals. We have got strong feelings and

00:21:16.780 instincts and drives and desires. So if you take anger, he says, not having enough means you cannot

00:21:25.500 be a effective moral agent. You will not look after your, your dependents. If somebody bullies

00:21:31.380 your child, you will not get into the headmaster's office to find out what's going on. If somebody

00:21:36.520 crashes into your car and breaks your legs, you will not take them to court to get proper restitution

00:21:42.760 and public acknowledgement of the damage that has been done to you. So not anger is actually

00:21:48.700 a real fault. On the other hand, of course, excessive anger, which means anger all the time

00:21:53.880 or with the wrong people. So taking it out on your children, if your boss is being a jerk or

00:22:00.700 uncontrollable or anger that never subsides or can't be dealt with, that is obviously a vice. And we all

00:22:07.040 know people with too much anger, just as we all know people who are apathetic. So the right amount

00:22:12.440 of anger, if channeled properly, is what gets you off your butt when injustice has been done to you

00:22:20.620 or your dependents to seek acknowledgement and correction of it. It's not in itself a bad thing

00:22:27.900 at all. Now, for somebody passionate like me, I found this far more helpful than just being told that

00:22:33.680 feeling angry was wrong. Far more helpful. And same goes for all the other ones.

00:22:39.560 We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.

00:22:42.600 And now back to the show. Did he have like any things where like he said, like you should never

00:22:47.840 do. It's like, okay, there's like no right way to murder or, you know, there's no right way.

00:22:52.860 Is there a spectrum of murder or a spectrum of adultery or a spectrum of stealing in Aristotle?

00:22:56.920 Or is his ethics more about more, I don't know. It's not like a, it's about just how to be a floor,

00:23:03.120 like a live your whole human potential.

00:23:04.880 There's practically no categories around the edge that are absolute. So murder is an emotive term.

00:23:11.800 If we say take someone else's life for Aristotle, if somebody else is going to take the life of your

00:23:17.720 child, if you don't take their life, then you clearly take their life. Right? Lying. He's wonderful

00:23:25.080 about lying. Instead of the truth being just a transcendent thing out there, he develops,

00:23:30.540 he thinks that the default position should be truth telling, because that means that you're

00:23:35.920 an authentic person who's consistent with yourself. Right? So there's only one truth about yourself.

00:23:41.440 So it's a good idea. Also, people who really love you can't help you if you feed them false

00:23:46.460 information. And I very much tried to knock this into my own children's head that I can't help them

00:23:52.260 if I don't have the full picture. So it is always to be rewarded to tell me the truth,

00:23:57.580 however troublesome that truth, we can do more with it. But there are times when you absolutely

00:24:04.260 have to lie. And bringing children up and telling them at three or five, punishing them for lying

00:24:09.600 is the incorrect response. What you need to do is sit them down and talk to them about

00:24:13.880 when it's okay to lie. And that is when someone is trying to damage you.

00:24:18.000 Right? If somebody says, get into my car, and you say, no, I can't, because my mother's just

00:24:26.400 around the corner when you know she isn't, that is fine. That is absolutely fine. You'd have to

00:24:31.700 train children to learn when you lie for self-preservation, and for the good of yourselves,

00:24:37.940 your loved ones, and your community, and when you don't. And it's actually far too simplistic

00:24:42.920 just to say truth, good, fiction, bad.

00:24:45.320 Well, that's going back to Kant. I remember when I took ethics in college, they always give that

00:24:49.160 example of, okay, you are in Nazi Germany, and you are hiding Jews. And the Nazis appear asking,

00:24:56.400 are you hiding any Jews? And Kant would say, yes, yes, I am. Because you're supposed to tell the

00:25:04.000 truth, and maybe you give the Jewish people you're hiding a head start. But Aristotle would say, no,

00:25:09.520 there's no one here. That's actually the right thing to do in that situation.

00:25:13.000 Of course it is. I mean, and that is a very extreme examples are good, because they get us

00:25:18.680 in touch with our common sense. But we're not most of us living under Nazi Germany, and things may not

00:25:24.640 be as clear as that. But I gave a couple of examples in the book of when I have very deliberately lied

00:25:33.000 for that actually, it was for the good of my children, in a particular bureaucratic setting.

00:25:39.300 And I would do it again, every single time, because my intentions were good.

00:25:45.080 And the idea of intention as the litmus test of all moral action is very, very, very important

00:25:52.240 to Aristotle. So he's much more interested in why someone did something which might appear on the

00:25:59.220 surface, or by stereotypical moral thinking to be culpable. He's much more interested in asking not

00:26:05.420 about the results, but the intention. So if you believe that you're killing someone to save your

00:26:11.780 child, if you genuinely believe that, even if it turns out that they weren't, you know, that you

00:26:19.040 were mistaken, that doesn't take away from the fact that you made that right decision, right? You might

00:26:24.680 suffer all kinds of remorse and problems if you discover you've made that mistake, but you will know

00:26:29.220 deep inside that you were trying to be a good person, and that will comfort you.

00:26:34.120 So how does Aristotle think we figure this stuff out? Like, how do you, how does he say,

00:26:38.160 how do you figure out what the right thing to do in these different situations you'll be placed in?

00:26:44.540 So that's where deliberation comes in. And I think, I love you the way you're doing this interview,

00:26:50.360 because you know, this is a complicated jigsaw. It does all fit together. But there are also

00:26:56.220 about 20 really important separate pieces. So the concept of deliberation, and we hardly use that

00:27:02.780 word deliberation in our society, which just shows how unimportant it is to us. The founding fathers

00:27:09.580 in America did use it in various of their documents about, you know, councils and democratic parliaments

00:27:15.040 and places for deliberation, for bringing about the possibilities of the pursuit of happiness.

00:27:21.120 You do have it in your culture, but it tends to get forgotten. It's a particular word in Greek

00:27:25.780 called, it's the verb is boulyouestai, which is, comes from the same root as the Greek word even

00:27:31.760 today for a parliament, the modern Greek, vouly. And he's thought it through, just as Aristotle always

00:27:37.940 does. He says, we can think about the science of decision making, just as we can think about the

00:27:43.400 science of happiness or the science of virtue, or the science of fulfilling potential. And he comes up

00:27:48.540 with a sort of eight point plan for making any decision. Now, of course, if you're just trying

00:27:55.040 to decide whether to have a peanut butter cookie or a chocolate chip cookie, you don't bring in this

00:28:00.980 entire apparatus of eight points every time. But if, for example, you're trying to decide whether

00:28:07.060 to leave the European Union as a nation, right, or leave your husband, then you certainly do.

00:28:15.240 And if you don't bring in the full apparatus of aids, I mean, they're aids to making the right

00:28:22.240 decision, then you're jeopardising your chance of the best outcome, and therefore happiness.

00:28:29.060 The whole chapter of the book, as you know, is how to make a decision, where I pull all this

00:28:35.220 together from his different ethical work. So the very first thing, the very, very first thing is

00:28:41.460 to verify all information. That sounds so simple, right? So am I going to leave my husband? Somebody's

00:28:50.380 told me that he's been having an affair. Do I bother to find out whether that's true, right, before I kick

00:28:58.100 off? Yes, of course I do. If I'm going to leave the European Union, do I bother to find out,

00:29:05.220 exactly how much money my nation is paying to Europe and how much we're getting in subsidies

00:29:10.760 from it before I vote? Well, ideally, of course, but in fact, none of us did that in that decision.

00:29:17.780 So just step number one means getting, you know, you may have to take a couple of days to put a lot

00:29:23.320 of effort into verifying all information. And in a world run by spin doctors who have no respect for

00:29:31.560 facts and the truth, this has got even more difficult.

00:29:35.480 So yeah, verifying facts is a part of it. And as you, yeah, yeah. And go ahead.

00:29:40.800 I can go into all eight, but that would take an hour.

00:29:42.880 It would take an hour. But the point I wanted to get to that, you know, this whole, this skill

00:29:49.740 of making decisions, like that is a virtue in and of itself, according to Aristotle.

00:29:54.280 Yeah. Being a good deliberator. Yeah. I think he calls it phronesis or practical wisdom. It's like,

00:30:01.880 that's what allows you to figure out like, what is the right thing? Like how, what is it? What do

00:30:05.960 you, what's the courageous thing to do in this instance?

00:30:08.060 Yeah. Thank you for saying that it's the cover word for, which is usually translated practical

00:30:14.340 wisdom, which is for being able to figure out what's the right thing to do in all circumstances.

00:30:20.920 It might be a big decision. It might simply be, you know, how you, if you're a teacher,

00:30:27.340 deal with a difficult kid in the classroom very instantaneously. And it requires experience.

00:30:34.620 That's one of the problems is that you can't just implant, you know, you can't load up a phronesis

00:30:42.580 hard drive into an 18 year old's head. They have to figure out partly through experience how

00:30:50.380 the world works. I could never have written this book as a younger woman. I've got, you know,

00:30:56.420 I'm 60 years old. I got, I've been bereaved. I've been divorced. I've raised children. I've been

00:31:03.780 sacked. I've fallen out with friends. I've also had a fantastic career, many wonderful opportunities,

00:31:11.720 lots of, you know, great things have happened to me, but I have been in a very many particular

00:31:16.380 situations where I or others have had to take important decisions. And the practical wisdom,

00:31:21.780 such as I've acquired, I'm by no means there, but all the examples in the book are real.

00:31:27.600 I may have changed the names or the genders, you know, or tiny details, but they're all real

00:31:33.500 dilemmas that I or my friends have faced. And through them, you develop a sense. And the really

00:31:39.440 important point to bring in another term is that once you've done this enough, it starts to be

00:31:44.380 a bit less of a conscious thing and more unconscious. It's like driving a car. You don't

00:31:50.960 have gear sticks. We have gear sticks. And we always use this metaphor. When you're first driving,

00:31:57.100 you have to think, do I go up into second gear? Do I go up into third gear? You know, what gear do I

00:32:02.120 take that bend in? After a year or two of driving, you never think about that anymore. And that's the

00:32:08.500 sort of analogy I use. It becomes a hexis habit. You can actually ingrain virtuous action. Another

00:32:15.920 example there is that I decided when I had children, because my parents had been very strict

00:32:21.100 1950s and 60s parents, who didn't smile at me. They didn't smile when you went to ask them for help.

00:32:29.260 So I, and I hated this. I was terrified of going to see them. And so I decided I was always going to

00:32:34.880 smile at my children. And of course, the first few years you're doing it deeply consciously,

00:32:39.680 like they're coming and you're, you're fixing your face into this rictus. Hello, darling.

00:32:44.180 What do you want? But in fact, it did become completely habitual to the extent that my children

00:32:49.600 tease me about it. So that's another point to bring about Aristotle is, and I think you hit on it a little

00:32:55.200 bit, is that he is very action oriented, right? You have to, you have to, you actually have to do this

00:33:00.000 stuff to learn it. You can't just read about it or talk about it. It's a verb, not, not a set of

00:33:05.680 ideas. It's a do thing. You do happiness. Right. But, but then there's also this idea that in

00:33:11.800 Aristotle, he's also, but he's also, there, there is a role for contemplation in Aristotle's ethics.

00:33:15.920 Like he doesn't completely disregard it, but he says it needs to, there needs to be a balance with

00:33:20.560 praxis. Yes. So you both reflect and think about it. And if you're that way inclined, that it's,

00:33:28.420 it absolutely fascinates you, then maybe that's what your telos is, is actually to be a philosopher

00:33:33.320 and do it full time. And a small proportion of the population should be doing exactly that.

00:33:39.280 But for most of us, it's a combination of just taking time to think, maybe reading some Aristotle

00:33:45.580 or reading some guides to him because his texts are quite difficult and complicated and putting it

00:33:53.120 into practical action and then doing, you know, postmortems on your action. How did that decision

00:33:59.660 work out? You know, and you'll be able to learn from that practical experience. You'll have to add

00:34:05.040 your practical wisdom. So it's, it's, to me, you know, it's just advanced common sense. I think an

00:34:12.920 awful lot of what I'm saying, people say, yes, but I do that anyway. And Aristotle actually said there

00:34:18.760 were people who were by nature, just good people, that they were sort of born able to do this. And

00:34:25.420 they just sort of almost automatically took the right decisions or they were born in very happy

00:34:33.020 families where they learnt by imitation without having to reflect on it very consciously, ways of

00:34:39.460 behaviour that would maximise their achievement of their potential and therefore their happiness and

00:34:46.120 good relationships. And we all see people like that out there. But for the vast majority of us,

00:34:52.120 it does require an awful lot more work and self-consciousness.

00:34:56.120 Well, that raises an interesting point about the role of luck or fate in the good life. So,

00:35:02.880 you know, some people are just, they're born into a family that, you know, inculcates great

00:35:06.480 habits and virtues in their kids. But some, a lot of people aren't. And sometimes people are born

00:35:14.140 into poverty or cancer, they get cancer when their, or their kid gets cancer. What does Aristotle say

00:35:20.080 about that? Is it possible to have a good life even when you're faced with tragedy or setbacks in

00:35:24.680 your life? Well, the answer is ultimately yes. But he, having said that, one of the things I found

00:35:31.920 very refreshing about him as a highly cynical 20-year-old, very well aware of the terrible

00:35:39.180 disadvantages that lots of people live under in the world was that he was terribly honest about

00:35:45.400 luck. He didn't like the word fate because fate implies that, because he did really believe in

00:35:51.580 free will and your ability to control and take responsibility for your happiness. Fate implies

00:35:56.460 something predestined and unshakable. But he did believe in just sheer random bad luck. And as you

00:36:04.200 quite rightly say, you can actually, this affects the hand of cards you're born with, right? So you

00:36:10.100 might be born very good looking or you might be born very ugly. You might be born very poor. You might be

00:36:15.200 born into lots of money. You might be born with an extraordinary talent, you know, to be a world

00:36:21.980 famous concert pianist. You might be born with very few obvious talents. So there's that. And then from day

00:36:30.960 one, when you're actually on the planet, you're faced with possibility of terrible accident or

00:36:36.300 illness or bereavement or bankruptcy or war, right? And that is just part of taking decisions. You've

00:36:46.140 got to calibrate risk. You've got to figure out if I'm going to leave my husband, you know, what will

00:36:52.700 happen if I get diagnosed with cancer in one week and I've taken the children with me, right? You have to

00:36:59.120 think that through. You've got to put the possibility of bad luck into your thinking. If you then actually

00:37:05.980 suffer from bad luck, he does think that even for the most appallingly unlucky people, his favourite

00:37:13.840 example is Priam of Troy, who of course was king of a famously happy and prosperous nation with 50 sons

00:37:21.400 who lost every single one of them in the Trojan War and lost his own life and all the women were

00:37:28.180 enslaved. But Aristotle would actually said, had he survived, he could have just about got over that

00:37:34.380 because if he knew that his own intentions had always been good, then he would at least be at peace

00:37:40.600 with himself, right? He wouldn't be suffering from remorse and guilt and feeling dirty and he would, if he

00:37:49.280 worked hard enough on it, be able to get some kind of happiness back and live a reasonably fulfilled

00:37:58.380 life. So that's actually very inspiring. He is very sanguine about death as well and I spent the whole

00:38:05.400 last chapter talking about that. He thinks we should all prepare ourselves for it and think quite hard

00:38:14.600 about it because it will help us lead a better life. Whatever time we've actually got, if we're

00:38:20.340 trying very hard to live well, then that will help us die well, make a proper will, look after our loved

00:38:26.640 ones and the projects that will go on after our deaths. So there is no magic wand. He's not offering

00:38:33.440 you immortality. He's not offering you any kind of immunity against getting a nasty disease. He himself

00:38:40.560 died at 62 when in fact people who lived that long very often lived till 80 or 90 in ancient Greece

00:38:47.900 and he got cut off in his prime, probably of stomach cancer. But his will that he left shows the

00:38:56.580 incredible thought he put in both looking after his family and he freed all his slaves for example

00:39:02.640 and he also invested a lot of thought in how his lyceum, his university, was going to continue

00:39:09.740 operating effectively. So he actually set his own example to us. He suffered some terrible bad luck

00:39:15.640 in his own life. He was bereaved at the age of 13 of both his parents, but still managed to achieve

00:39:21.860 what he was born with, which was the power, the dunamis, the potential to achieve his P-loss of being

00:39:29.340 the greatest intellectual the world had ever seen.

00:39:32.220 Okay, well let's think about, let's talk about our relationship with other humans because this is

00:39:35.640 another part of Aristotle's ethics that a lot of times when people talk about philosophy or how to

00:39:41.920 live a good life, it's very self-centered. It's like, how can I take care of myself? It's just like,

00:39:46.260 you know, how can I control my emotions? But Aristotle also thought about, no, in order to live a good

00:39:50.040 life, you have to have relationships or friendships with other people. Talk about that a bit.

00:39:54.500 Well, he actually regarded relationships as the most important aspects of human life. He was interested in

00:40:01.460 the difference between animals and humans in our capacity to make very, very strong bonds with

00:40:08.100 non-kin, for example, and our city building abilities, that is building large communities

00:40:15.360 where there are people who we don't know personally, but who are our friends because

00:40:19.720 they're our fellow citizens and our good depends on their good, right? So it's entirely relational,

00:40:27.580 entirely relational. And he regarded his four or five very close friendships, including with his

00:40:34.120 young colleague, younger colleague, Theophrastus, who was the inventor of botany, as the most important

00:40:39.860 things in his life. But the trouble is they take a lot of work and investment. And the most important

00:40:45.980 thing is trust. So whether it's with your wife, your best friend, your colleague at work, your fellow

00:40:55.100 citizen, or even with the people in another country on another part of the world, trust is what is

00:41:02.540 absolutely indispensable to a good relationship. And the good relationship is indispensable to happiness.

00:41:10.200 Misery only ever results from breaking trust. That's actually one reason. When I said that there

00:41:15.280 were no categorical imperatives in his thinking, he actually says adultery, which is very strange for

00:41:21.720 an ancient Greek male who had many opportunities to commit adultery and wasn't really blamed for it,

00:41:27.780 right? He was free to have sex outside the house. He hates adultery. And the reason he hates it is not

00:41:34.660 because you're sort of cheating on someone in the sense that we see it, but because the primary

00:41:41.620 relationship, which is your life partner, the person that you have sex with, is the building

00:41:48.360 block of all of society for him. Society starts with that partnership, right? And then there are

00:41:54.480 more partnerships in the household. If you compromise that partnership by breaking trust, he says basically

00:42:01.960 the foundations of your whole civilisation are placed on crumbling stones. Now that really appeals to me as an

00:42:10.840 intellectual argument. And I've personally found it very helpful. If you go and sleep with someone else,

00:42:18.260 you're not just cheating on your husband. You're actually taking out a foundation stone of, you know,

00:42:23.900 in my case, an extended family and a community of people who will all be affected by it because the

00:42:31.720 trust has gone. So you're going to affect happiness by far more than just one person. And I've thought

00:42:36.340 about this one very, very hard. He does say that one slip doesn't matter. And I do wonder whether he

00:42:42.160 didn't just one slip, but that he's committed to the principle of absolute honesty and trust and

00:42:49.680 fidelity to his woman. Did Aristotle have any tips on how to pick a good spouse or how to pick good

00:42:58.500 friends? Yes. Well, he had several very, very, very good friends who were other philosophers,

00:43:03.980 mostly, especially Theophrastus. Theophrastus was 17 years younger than him, but he trained him and

00:43:10.240 Theophrastus took over the Lyceum from him when Aristotle died. But he married, at the age of 37,

00:43:17.860 a princess of a philosopher king in a Greek city in what's now Turkey. He married his daughter and

00:43:25.620 it seems to have been a huge love match, but unfortunately she died very quickly, probably

00:43:29.740 in childbirth, leaving him a daughter who he adored. And after that, he made a relationship

00:43:37.400 but didn't marry. And we don't know why. It could possibly have been that she was married to someone

00:43:42.760 else and left him. Or it could be that she was of slave status. But from his old hometown, he married

00:43:49.260 what seems to have been a childhood sweetheart and called her Pilus. And he had his son, Nicomachus,

00:43:57.480 with her, who he recognised as fully legitimate and who he dedicated his greatest work on ethics to.

00:44:04.820 And what's very moving for me is that in his will, he takes very, very special care of this woman,

00:44:11.160 even though she wasn't his actual wife. And he says she's to choose her own house, either his old mother's

00:44:17.240 old house in southern Greece or his father's old house in northern Greece. And she is to choose her own

00:44:25.380 internal decor, he says, because she has been good to me. And I find this incredibly touching because

00:44:33.140 he used as his executor the most powerful man in Greece at the time, the Macedonian ruler of Greece.

00:44:39.800 He was meant business. You know, his will was going to be enforced. Nobody was going to muck around with it.

00:44:45.100 But he actually puts in that, my woman does not want generals choosing her furniture, please.

00:44:53.000 She had said to him, Aristotle, please, can you just put that clause in your will? And he did. How great is that?

00:44:59.980 Oh, it is great. I mean, so I imagine Aristotle would say, you know, find somebody that helps you live a good life.

00:45:06.780 Is that what it is? Or is it just love? Or what would he say?

00:45:10.320 A show. You have to sit down and decide what you want to do with your life with them.

00:45:16.400 And so many couples don't do this. They don't even ask each other whether they both want children before they get hitched.

00:45:22.460 You know, these basic, basic things, where they want to live, what professions they want to pursue, you know, what are their main goals in life?

00:45:30.520 And he's got absolutely clear that the mutual goals, especially with it comes to raising progeny or whatever it is you want to contribute,

00:45:41.440 are far more important than the transient pleasures of, say, sexual attraction as young people.

00:45:47.820 So, I mean, his advice would be long conversations. And if your goals don't match, then it's not going to work.

00:45:54.880 That's like advice you get from a 21st century relationship therapist.

00:45:59.700 Obviously.

00:46:00.140 But I find it, because I'm a university teacher, so I'm dealing all the time with people, quite apart from my own children, who are now young adults.

00:46:08.360 But I'm dealing all the time professionally with 18 to 25-year-olds, sort of undergraduates and doctoral students.

00:46:14.780 And I am appalled by the bases on which they enter long-term relationships sometimes.

00:46:20.680 But they have to learn through their own mistakes.

00:46:24.540 Right. They've got to develop that phrenesis.

00:46:26.620 Yeah.

00:46:26.840 So another part, too, about relationships is that Aristotle thought, in order to live a flourishing life, that you had to be active, an active participant in your community.

00:46:35.720 Well, you didn't have to be.

00:46:38.300 It's a little bit strong.

00:46:39.680 The difference is that many ancient philosophies, like Epicureanism and the Cynic School, and up to a point, Platonism, suggested withdrawing completely from the affairs of the city.

00:46:54.500 Aristotle, I think, if somebody said they actually really wanted to live quite a quiet life as a farmer up in the hills, that's fine.

00:47:01.300 But what he didn't like was the idea that being a civic person or running a business or getting into politics or being an actor, that any of these was actually sort of tawdry or likely to coarsen you, which is the position of a lot of other ancient philosophers that you should try and sort of somehow remove yourself from society.

00:47:25.900 He saw the human arena of the city-state, politics, education, business, all of that as the place where you go in and exercise your virtues and you make your relationships and you jolly well contribute to the community if you've got something to offer.

00:47:43.220 Yeah, that's what's interesting about the virtues that he talked about.

00:47:45.280 In order to exercise them, it requires other people.

00:47:48.000 Yes.

00:47:48.540 Oftentimes.

00:47:49.360 Absolutely.

00:47:49.740 He even discusses that with some humor, actually, in terms of sort of finances.

00:47:56.220 Like, we only need money because we've got to have a sort of abstract way of dealing with each other over surfaces.

00:48:03.840 You know, a man living alone on a mountain doesn't even need money.

00:48:07.100 Money is not inherently an evil.

00:48:09.060 It's a matter of how we deal with it between each other.

00:48:12.600 No, yeah.

00:48:13.240 I mean, like anger.

00:48:14.400 Whenever you get angry, it's with other people, typically.

00:48:17.280 You don't get angry at cows who, you know, get in the way or whatever because it's a cow.

00:48:21.620 It doesn't know what it's doing.

00:48:23.000 Well, let's talk about, like, the role of emotions in Aristotle's philosophy.

00:48:26.460 So, you mentioned the Stoics.

00:48:27.560 They're all about, okay, whatever happens to you, it upsets you because you want it because you say it upsets you.

00:48:35.140 Aristotle, it sounds like, would say, no, emotions are a part of our nature as human beings because we're animals.

00:48:41.120 The trick is just learning how to manage them and, you know, exercising those emotions in the right way.

00:48:46.080 Oh, yes, it is.

00:48:48.040 But not even, you know, the more, he's very sanguine about friendship.

00:48:53.720 He says the more you invest, if you invest 30, 40 years in a really wonderful trusting friendship with someone, when you die, you lose it.

00:49:02.860 You both lose it.

00:49:04.100 This is incredibly painful.

00:49:05.360 And he's completely clear and denying the pain of that, which a Stoic would do and say that a proper masculine man doesn't show any pain when he loses a friend because the cosmos is, you know, dictated by fate and all the rest of it.

00:49:20.820 He would actually laugh at that, I think.

00:49:23.400 If something is really, really worth having, then it's going to hurt losing it.

00:49:27.420 Well, Edith, this has been a great conversation.

00:49:29.380 Is there some place people can go to learn more about your work?

00:49:31.700 Well, I have a personal website, which is www.edithhall.co.uk.

00:49:44.360 And all my information about my books, publications, public lectures, broadcasting, bits on YouTube, that kind of thing, are available there.

00:49:55.360 Well, fantastic.

00:49:56.020 Edith Hall, thanks so much for your time.

00:49:57.200 It's been a pleasure.

00:49:58.040 Thank you so much.

00:49:59.040 My guest today was Edith Hall.

00:50:00.420 She's the author of the book, Aristotle's Way.

00:50:02.540 It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.

00:50:04.920 You can find out more information about her work at our website, edithhall.co.uk.

00:50:09.760 Also, check out our show notes at aom.is slash Aristotle, where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this topic.

00:50:22.760 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast.

00:50:25.340 Check out our website, artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives.

00:50:29.040 There's over 500 episodes there, as well as thousands of articles written over the years about philosophy, this Aristotle topic interested you, but as well as practical things about physical fitness, personal finance, how to be a better husband, better father.

00:50:40.500 And if you'd like to hear ad-free episodes of The Art of Manliness, you can do so on Stitcher Premium.

00:50:45.720 Go to stitcherpremium.com and use promo code MANLINESS.

00:50:48.420 You'll get a free month of Stitcher Premium.

00:50:50.160 Once you sign up at stitcherpremium.com, just download the Stitcher app for iOS or Android, and you start enjoying ad-free Art of Manliness episodes.

00:50:57.160 And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on iTunes or Stitcher.

00:51:01.680 It helps out a lot.

00:51:02.540 And if you've done that already, thank you.

00:51:04.180 Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it.

00:51:08.060 As always, thank you for the continued support.

00:51:09.900 Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding not only to listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

00:51:27.160 Thank you for listening to the AOM podcast.

The Art of Manliness - June 10, 2019

#515： Aristotle's Wisdom on Living the Good Life

Episode Stats

Length

Words per Minute

Word Count

Sentence Count

Misogynist Sentences

Hate Speech Sentences

Summary

Transcript