Thoughts on Aristotle - (Aristotle 1)

   I am rereading Aristotle’s Nichomachaen Ethics – in a new translation that 1) really lets Aristotle’s voice come through (or one possible voice of Aristotle), and 2) translates the Greek into a modern English idiom. When I was studying Greek (1978-1982), I read Plato (The Apology, The Republic, The Phaedrus, and fragments of other works) but never read Aristotle and never wanted to.  Aristotle wrote dialogs that were said to be masterpieces of writing. But all have been lost, in events like the fire that burned the great library at Alexandria, first by Christian fanatics and then by Muslim fanatics – a rare area where Christians and Muslims agreed:

 

The second, more famous, burning of the library came at the hands of Theophilus who was Patriarch of Alexandria from 385 to 412 CE. He turned the Temple of Serapis into a Christian church. It is likely that the collection was destroyed by the Christians who moved in. Some sources say nearly 10 percent of the library’s collection was housed in the Temple of Serapis. In the following years, the Christian attack against the library escalated, and the last great pagan philosopher and librarian, Hypatia, was tortured and killed.

 

The final blow came in 640 CE when Alexandria came under Muslim rule. The Muslim ruler, Caliph Omar, asserted that the library’s contents would “either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous.” The contents of the library were then supposedly used as tinder for the city’s bathhouses. Even then, it is said that it took six months for all the materials to burn. Practically nothing of the library remains today.

 

In any case, it is the first time I have ever enjoyed reading Aristotle, thanks be to the translator. (It is the Penguin edition.)

 

  I have always been attracted to certain aspects of Aristotle’s ethical thought. Developing good character traits like honesty, courage, a sense of justice, having the self-restraint necessary to handle the desires for food, sex, and money, and training your understanding to know your priorities and the right thing to do. An essential goal of education and upbringing is making these “virtues” into predispositions and, in the end, into spiritual demeanors. Having fallen short of true virtue in my life, I am in a good position to know how important this is.

   You do this by practicing. “We can only learn to love by loving,” wrote Iris Murdoch. That is an Aristotelian thought. It applies to all the virtues. You can only learn to be honest by telling the truth. Paul James lied about brushing his teeth when he was young. He was just too lazy to brush. I caught him, he was ashamed and promised to do better. So when the temptation to lie about such things arises, he controls them with the thought that it is bad to lie – your words will come to mean nothing, you damage your relationship with others who are close to you and upon whom you depend, you feed other vices like laziness, in the end you might forget how to distinguish between truth and lie altogether and become a Trump (a form of being in Hell). Perhaps he understands all that now. In the beginning it was perhaps mostly shame that motivated him to overcome such temptations and tell the truth. That is a paradigm of how one learns to be virtuous for Aristotle.

    This is interesting because you don’t become a good person by studying philosophy for Aristotle. Virtue was knowledge for Plato (and Socrates I suppose) but whatever that means, it does not mean we can take a philosophy course on virtue and thereby become virtuous. We take on these habits, if we are lucky, long before we can intellectually speculate about them. Emotions are essential – shame in the example I just mentioned. I guess some people will think: this is just behavioral conditioning. Aristotle was deeper. He believed it was our ‘natural’ human state to live in political community with others (actually, if you happen to be a man, but I will let that slide for now), and that only virtuous people can function and thrive in a political community. Thus he also believed it was natural to feel pleasure when you overcome a temptation to lie and tell the truth. It is natural to feel pleasure when your family or community acknowledges your honesty and defines you as an honest person. It is natural in a sense to feel disgusted when confronted with a lying scoundrel like Trump. This is healthy in a sense, just as it is healthy and natural to feel pleasure when in the presence of something beautiful. Emotions are like thoughts: they are responses to reality, and can be ‘true’ or ‘false’ to that reality.

    As a parent or teacher, you want your children or pupils to feel the right things. Only then will they be able to understand what it is to be human at a later stage in their development. Compare this response of Trump:

 

When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, near Paris, in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.

 

Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed. (Jeffery Goldberg, The Atlantic)

 

Most of us feel reverence in the presence of the graves of those who sacrificed their lives for a greater good. For Trump, a pathological narcissist if there ever was one, it is unintelligible that anyone would die for a greater good, which is connected to his inability to feel reverence, which is to say, is connected to his feeling of contempt for the soldiers who fell in combat. A person incapable of life in a political community is what defines a tyrant (Cicero). This is because he never learned that any community has any meaning, value, or reality. In contrast, Paul James’ comparatively insignificant lesson in honesty contained in itself a valuing of his father and his family. His own good is bound to his being an honest person, and honesty only makes sense if relationships, community are real and valuable. Aristotle believed that apart from community you were either a god or a beast, but not human. Trump – not a god – never learned that community mattered, and thus no virtue much less a hard one like physical courage makes sense to him. Perhaps he could be brought intellectually to understand this – or could have been brought while his brain still worked. But unless he can feel reverence at a soldier's cemetery, he won’t understand courage. The emotions are the bridges to understanding. The understanding is contained in the emotions – or not.

 

    One more thing I like about Aristotle. We can only be fully human in a political community. Virtues like courage and justice have their point in the community. They can become fully actualized only in a community. It would be like learning to play the piano from a book without a piano otherwise. Without such a community, one’s words and actions don’t mean anything; they don’t matter. And for Aristotle, the political community that made the highest form of humanity possible was democratic, where

 

Every man had his public duties to perform, at least in the democratic communities, as politician and soldier. The Greeks had a word for those who avoided these duties: the word was 'idiot.' (Aubrey De Sélincourt)

 

Including in politician was being a member of a jury, which the whole assembly was. If that is going to work at all, a high degree of truthfulness, justice, practical wisdom (common sense), and courage must be present. (Contrast the pitiful state of the GOP in Congress now.) These are constantly exercised, just like Paul James having the opportunity to tell the truth about brushing his teeth. What is good for an individual is not something apart from what is good for the polis – the Greek word for the political community that can’t be translated because we have nothing analogous in our world.

     And it is only in a political community that you can reveal who you are, through your words and acts, words and acts that matter to other people, that are taken seriously, that have consequences, that you have to own (contrast to social media today for the opposite). And a big part of who you are is the character you reveal. We can see this in our own experience. Republicans like Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, and Adam Kinzinger have revealed through their words and actions that they are loyal, that they are people of courage and integrity; people like Lindsay Graham, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and J.D. Vance have revealed themselves to be sycophantic cowards incapable of having an authentic voice, of being taken seriously. Responsibility for the community develops, tests, and reveals character.

       If you are not part of a polis, you don’t have to chance to be “a someone” in the full sense for Aristotle – this is getting out of the Ethics into the Politics, but they are one line of thought. The polis was what made Greek culture different. Their geography made large political and economic entities extremely difficult. Greeks thus developed small political units in which at least every male citizen could have a voice in political and legal affairs – and of course also fought as soldiers in times of war. The polis was “the focus of a man’s moral, intellectual, aesthetic, social, and practical life” (Kitto, The Greeks) in a way a modern nation-state cannot be for its citizens. The polis was “the means by which the Greek consciously strove to make the life of both the community and the individual more excellent than it was before.”

    The size of the polis was not accidental. Aristotle said that a polis of 10 citizens could not work because it could not be self-sufficient but a polis of 100,000 would be absurd because it could not govern itself.  Size is important if all citizens are to have an active voice, to see and be seen. A difference in quantity at some point becomes a difference in quality. The Persian Empire could not be a social or political form that could bring out our true humanity for Aristotle – and neither could the modern national state. Aristotle wrote: “man is a creature who lives in a polis” [the more literal translation of “man is a political animal”]. The thesis of the thought contained in the Politics: “the polis is the only framework within which man can fully realize his spiritual, moral, and intellectual capacities (Kitto).”

      That living in a polis is not practical today is not a refutation of that argument. It became "impractical" when a student of Aristotle, Alexander of Macedonia (so-called the "great" though not great in my mind) put the nail in the coffin of the polis, and thus the virtues in the fullest sense. For Aristotle that must have been equivalent to The Fall of Man. 

    In any case, the loss of meaning, the feeling of impotence, the absence of a community (outside the family) where your words and deeds matter – I guess most of us can relate to that.

 

I have written about what I like about Aristotle. Tomorrow comes my criticism.