Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

"Edith Hall is a classicist, and unlike many academic philosophers who write about Aristotle’s philosophy, she’s read the whole of Aristotle’s works. She’s read not only his philosophical writings, but also what he wrote about science and politics—all in the original language. So her take differs from a typical philosopher’s. She is also a complete devotee of Aristotle, and has been for many years. She’s tried to live her life by Aristotle’s principles. She argues in the book that this has helped her and is something which should be taken seriously as a guide to how to live, which is what Aristotle intended. The point of moral philosophy for many ancient philosophers was not just to dispute the meaning of words, but positively to affect how people lived, and Aristotle was definitely in that game. “She is also a complete devotee of Aristotle, and has been for many years. She’s tried to live her life by Aristotle’s principles.” Oddly, within academic philosophy, Aristotle has been (as Edith would see it, and as I certainly do) hijacked by quite right-wing, conservative, Catholic (not in the open sense, but in the religious sense) thinkers. An extreme case would be the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe. She had certain Aristotelian elements in her thought, certainly. Her take on Aristotelian ethics—which is based on human nature and how human beings flourish—is that certain organs of the body are made for certain things. They have particular purposes, and so to use your sexual organs for anything but intrinsically procreative acts would be morally wrong. For her, that included oral sex, masturbation, and of course homosexuality. This is completely incongruous from a historical point of view, of course, and a bit ridiculous. But this was Anscombe taking Aristotelian arguments and applying them within a conservative Catholic framework. Edith Hall is nothing like that. Her Aristotle is nothing like Anscombe’s version. Aristotle was a writer who was very much concerned with what will make a human life go well, and so she treats him as a source for good advice on just that: good advice on how to be human. Firstly, it’s important to realize that for Aristotle, being happy is not about being in a blissful mental state. It’s about a certain kind of contentment over a life. ‘ Eudaimonia ’ is the Greek word that’s often used, because it doesn’t quite map onto our everyday sense of feeling happy. The word ‘flourishing’ is one translation of this. Just as plants flourish in a well-kept garden, human beings flourish if they organize their lives in ways that are consistent with their nature and avoid doing that which harms them. For Aristotle, the main thing that makes a life go well is acting virtuously. A virtue is just a pattern of behaviour of a good kind. Each of the virtues lies between two extremes. Bravery, for instance, is one of his virtues. It lies between the extremes of foolhardiness—it’s not bravery if you jump in because you are completely oblivious to danger or don’t care about being harmed; that’s just stupidity—and cowardice, where you are too frightened to act. You recognize the fear and that’s appropriate but are too influenced by it, and unable to do the right thing. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Bravery—the virtue, the disposition, the set of behaviors that we value highly in society, which we would want to try and achieve—lies between those two extremes. For Aristotle, bravery is recognizing the danger, but being able to overcome it sufficiently to, say, save a wounded comrade, or intervene on a train when somebody’s being racist. You recognize there is a risk involved, but you don’t sit there quietly out of cowardice, nor do you jump in between people and get punched in the face. You do something that is brave, but not foolhardy. This is a really useful framework for thinking about what we value as morally good behaviour. But for Aristotle it’s not just about that. It’s that the morally good behaviour contributes to a worthwhile life. In other words, a flourishing life. It makes you not just a better person, but a more fulfilled person. Edith Hall is a strong advocate of this sort of behaviour, which is the result of instilling good habits in oneself or having them instilled early on by others. Aristotle certainly identified things which he thought were virtuous. It’s possible his list wasn’t complete, for sure, and that we would want to add to it. But the other important thing about Aristotle—and this is something that Edith Hall brings out very strongly—is that he was a scientist. Or a proto-scientist, let’s say. He was concerned with the real world. This is in contrast with Plato , his predecessor (and Socrates, as far as we can tell), who were concerned with what they thought was the real world, but we would call the world of ‘Ideas’. Plato thought true reality was this abstract world of forms with a capital ‘F’, and everything about our everyday reality was an imperfect copy of the perfect version that exists in this world of Forms beyond our ordinary perception. Aristotle stands in complete contrast to that. He was concerned with what actually occurs out there in the world. He effectively set up teams of researchers who worked with him to describe not just morals and political behaviour, but things like octopuses and how the tides work. Aristotle was a bit like Leonardo da Vinci , a real genius absolutely concerned with how things are, endlessly fascinated by the world. “Aristotle was a bit like Leonardo da Vinci, a real genius absolutely concerned with how things are, endlessly fascinated by the world.” That carries across to his thinking about how we should live. It all ties together very neatly. We are the kind of being that flourishes within certain sorts of natural frameworks. Also, he does all this without using God as the entity that judges you. It’s very much focused on the human being as part of the natural world, which sounds like a very modern, almost a post-Darwinian idea. So it’s very attractive. The big problem is that most of Aristotle’s writings have come down to us in a really difficult form, from a literary point of view. He was certainly capable of writing beautifully (or so his contemporaries believed), but unlike the writings of Plato, which are polished dialogues, from Aristotle we have combinations of lecture notes and things that were designed to be given to students rather than the more literary versions. So, in some ways, it’s better to read somebody like Edith Hall singing the praises of Aristotle than to go back to the primary texts. You should, if you’ve got the energy. But you shouldn’t expect it to be satisfying anything like the crafted Socratic dialogues by Plato, or Seneca’s letters. That’s just one of the things that happens with fragments and texts and the loss of manuscripts. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Last year, we recommended How to be a Stoic by Massimo Pigliucci as one of the best books of the year. It’s interesting that Aristotle’s Way is another book in that genre: going back to classical philosophy and renewing it for the present day. It’s a very interesting phenomenon and I’m sure we’re going to have more books along these lines in the future. We’ll have ‘Why you should be an Epicurean’, or maybe ‘Why you should be a Cynic’, which might be a bit subversive. It’s going to happen. It’s a very interesting way to think about past philosophy. Philosophy isn’t a museum of dusty ideas; you can find ways in which philosophy can directly affect how you live. Particularly with classical philosophy, there’s a sense that many thinkers of those times were trying to put forward not just abstract theories, but guides to life. “Philosophy isn’t a museum of dusty ideas; you can find ways in which philosophy can directly affect how you live.” Aristotle stands in direct contrast to the Stoics. The Stoics thought you could be impervious to external circumstances, whereas Aristotle thought that whether you were rich or poor, for example, made a big difference to your chance of happiness. You need to have a certain minimal level of wealth before you can have a good chance of happiness. You have to have a certain degree of luck in what befalls you. Whereas for the Stoics, there’s a sense in which even if you suffer the most extreme tragedy—such as a child dying—you should be able to cope, because you’re resilient. You’ve trained yourself in Stoic methodology to be impervious to external events. Aristotle is not like that at all. He acknowledges that the truth about life is that there are things which happen to you which affect your capacity to be content and to have a worthwhile, fulfilling life. I agree. Certainly that’s Edith Hall’s line, too. They’re two very different books, though they overlap in biographical detail. Both are very much driven by the life that Nietzsche led."