Trevor's Reviews > Nicomachean Ethics

I’m a bit annoyed – I wrote up my review to this last night and thought I’d posted it, but it seems to have gone to god…not happy about that (amusingly enough). This is my reconstruction of last night’s review.

There is a story that is almost certainly apocryphal about a French woman (in the version I know, this is Madame De Gaulle) who is in England towards the end of her husband’s career and is asked at some sort of official function what she wants most from life. She answers, ‘a penis’ – which, unsurprisingly, brings a near complete silence over the room, something see seems completely confused by. Charles De Gaulle then says to his wife, ‘I think they pronounce it ‘appiness’, darling’

Aristotle is writing about how to live a good life – pretty much what ‘ethics’ means – and his answer is that a good life is a happy life. Well, sort of. Actually, the Greek word that is translated as ‘happiness’ here (not unlike Madame De Gaulle’s mis-pronunciation) doesn’t necessarily mean what we would normally take ‘happiness’ to mean. Eudaimonia is made up of two words meaning ‘good’ and ‘soul’, but can also be translated as meaning ‘human flourishing’. Now, if you asked me how I was going and I said, ‘I’m flourishing’, that doesn’t necessarily mean ‘I’m happy’. It is not that the two ideas are a million miles apart, but even Roget would be unlikely to slam them together in his little book of synonyms.

This is a remarkably practical book – not so much in that it tells you exactly how to behave at all times and in all circumstances, it isn’t practical in that sense, but rather that it sets about giving you tools to help make a rational judgement about how you ought to behave given various circumstances.

It does this by discussing Aristotle’s ‘doctrine of the mean’. Aristotle says that every virtue falls between two extremes which are excesses of qualities that also go to make up that virtue. So, if you think of courage, for example, it falls between cowardice and foolhardiness. In one case you have an exaggerated regard for your own life (despite being seen as a coward and the likely humiliation that will bring) and in the other you are too prepared to throw your life away and therefore not giving your life its proper value. Now, the point is that Aristotle isn’t saying all that much here about how you might behave in a given situation, but rather giving you guiding lines to watch out for – his point is that if you are called upon to be brave there may be times when it is rational to behave in ways that might otherwise look foolhardy, and at other times in ways that might look cowardly – but a wise and happy person would do so on the basis of a rational assessment of where the mean lies given the time, place and circumstance – and knowing there are extremes you need to avoid is useful here.

There are bits of this that I found much more annoying this time around than I did when I read it years ago (30 years ago, now – yuck… how did that happen?). In fact, I can’t quite tell if Aristotle has become more reactionary over the years or if I’ve become more progressive – but it’s one or the other.

For instance, I found a lot of his discussions about women particularly annoying this time around. Take this as a case in point from Book VIII, “Sometimes, however, women rule, because they are heiresses; their rule is thus not in accordance with virtue, but due to wealth and power” (page 157). People will tell you that one of the problems with Aristotle and Plato is the fact that they could never conceive of a society in which there were no slaves – but one of the advantages of Plato is that he did think women could, and probably should, be educated. Aristotle clearly does not – but the point I would really like to make is that he notices when women rule due to their wealth and power, but not when men do the same. Given so many more men rule at all and so many of them rule due to the access their position gives them – it seems an odd thing for someone like Aristotle not to notice.

Because this is quite a practical ethics, he spends a lot of time talking about the sorts of things people ought to have in their lives to make them happy – and this is why so much of the book is devoted to friendship. I won’t go over his arguments for the various types of friends one might have, but do want to talk about love and lovers. I think I could mount a case for saying that Aristotle is arguing against having a lover. Not that he is advocating a life of celibacy or even of abstinence, but rather that lovers come in what I like to think of as pairs (after McCullers or Somerset Maugham – who both said that there are lovers and the beloved and of the two everyone wants to be the lover, rather than the beloved) – and that since being either the lover or a beloved is basically irrational, given we fall in love by lightning strike as much as anything else, it might stop just as quickly as it all started, and then a lover who doesn’t love any more leaves a beloved who is no longer beloved – not the basis for a lasting relationship. The point being that friendship is based more rationally on mutual benefits and mutual care – if it was me, I’d pick the latter over the former (friendship over love) every time – if these things allowed for choices like that, that is.

Now, I want to end by quoting a longer bit from Book X (page 200).

“Some think we become good by nature, some by habit, and others by teaching. Nature's contribution is clearly not in our power, but it can be found in those who are truly fortunate as the result of some divine dispensation. Argument and teaching, presumably, are not powerful in every case, but the soul of the student must be prepared beforehand in its habits, with a view to its enjoying and hating in a noble way, like soil that is to nourish seed. For if someone were to live by his feelings he would not listen to an argument to dissuade him, nor could he even understand it. How can we persuade a person in a state like this to change his ways? And, in general, feelings seem to yield not to argument but to force. There must, therefore, somehow be a pre-existing character with some affinity for virtue through its fondness for what is noble and dislike of what is disgraceful.
“But if one has not been reared under the right laws it is difficult to obtain from one's earliest years the correct upbringing for virtue, because the masses, especially the young, do not find it pleasant to live temperately and with endurance. For this reason, their upbringing and pursuits should be regulated by laws, because they will not find them painful once they have become accustomed to them.”

I find this really interesting for a whole range of reasons. Okay, so, he starts off by saying that nature is the main thing to ensure that one is capable of learning – but it is interesting that this alone is not enough. Nature is essential, but left on its own will not get you very far. The other is teaching, but teaching too may not help unless you have been prepared to hear the lesson – something Gramsci talks about at some length saying working class children need to be given discipline (that they are unfamiliar with) if they are to have any hope of succeeding in education. What is stressed here is the development of habits and dispositions and that these are what allows the other two (nature and teaching) to be given any chance of success.

Aristotle is keen to stress that he is talking about virtues – but again, the Greek word here (arête) doesn’t just mean morally good behaviours, but rather something closer to the excellences that we associate with different kinds of behaviours – so that a fisherman has virtues too, not in the sense of being morally upright, but rather, at knowing what is good for a fisherman to do and be.

A lot of this reminded me of Pascal’s Pensées. There is a bit in that where Pascal says that happiness really isn’t related to the outcome, but more to the process. That is, that you won’t make a hunter happy by giving him a couple of rabbits at the start of the day and saying to him, ‘now you don’t have to go out hunting today, relax, enjoy yourself’. Rather, even a mangy rabbit caught through the effort of the hunt will be worth more to the hunter than a dozen plump ones handed over without effort at the start of the day. Not always true, of course, but I’m exaggerating to make the point. In a lot of ways that is Aristotle’s ethics – find out what you are meant to do and do that as best you can and that will make you happy – or good souled – or flourishing – one of those.