Ethics With Aristotle

"I wouldn’t call it a commentary, because I tend to see commentaries as consisting of lemmatised text with sequences of references to line numbers. That’s what I call a commentary. This is a long, highly engaged critical reading. Of the Nicomachean Ethics , it only misses out friendship/partnership, which is a big one, and some passages when Aristotle goes into real detail on the separate virtues. It is. I think it would be much better to read through some of the historical background to Aristotle first. But it is exceptionally lucid. It is very solid—over four hundred pages long. It’s highly argumentative and it also disagrees with many mainstream Aristotelians on one important point. She quarrels with Aristotle every inch of the way, which means that, by the end of it, whether you agree with her or with Aristotle, you have been on an Aristotelian journey. It’s such a challenge. “She quarrels with Aristotle every inch of the way; whether you agree with her or with Aristotle, by the end you have been on an Aristotelian journey” She’s very Scottish and sensible. Relative to other philosophers, Broadie writes beautifully short sentences (which Aristotle recommends in his Rhetoric ). This makes it much easier to follow the arguments, although you’ll probably have to read it two or three times to grasp her full line of reasoning. In my view it’s the very best accompaniment to the Ethics in the English language. Well, we don’t know. The recension of his texts from antiquity is another whole story. It’s such a mess because they all got lost and were stuck in a ditch for two hundred years in western Turkey before being saved by book merchants and then by the Roman general Sulla. He realised how important they were. He managed to get them back to Rome. We are told this by several authors including an ancient geographer called Strabo who much loved Aristotle. Strabo tells us the terrible story of how they were subsequently badly copied out by booksellers who were desperate to make a fast buck and didn’t use systematic redaction of different manuscripts. With even the surviving books–Aristotle wrote between one and two hundred, and we’ve only got an eighth of the total—we have to be far more careful about assuming that every single word is correctly transmitted, in a way we don’t with Plato. Plato was carefully copied out from day one and was preserved beautifully in the manuscript tradition of Byzantium. Exactly, in what survives . But I would like to insist that we know from the way that people talk about his exoteric works—the short, accessible treatises he wrote to circulate amongst the public—that they were dramatic dialogues like Plato’s, and they were famed for their beauty. It is so sad that they have not survived for us to read. Yes. Cicero talks about the “golden river” of Aristotle’s prose in the popular works. This does not apply to what has survived, which is mostly advanced writing for trainee philosophers. If you look at my texts for when I’m training my postgraduates, then I absolutely don’t bother to make them easy. If I need to use a neologism or new language or shorthand or specialist, technical terminology, then I will. It is part of learning the technē of being a classicist. But I would never dream of publishing prose like that for the general public. You as a public philosopher will completely get what I mean. So, yes, Aristotle’s work is dense and difficult and that’s why I wanted to write a book that put across Aristotelian ideas through some real practical case studies and moral dilemmas that I and my friends have faced. Yes, absolutely. Aristotle does present some radical views, though, that do have clear practical implications. For example, the omission/commission one. Long before the Roman Catholics invented sins of omission, Aristotle—in book three of the Nicomachean Ethics— has an extraordinary set of sentences where he says that if you are accountable and responsible for something that you did which had bad results, then if you chose not to do something and the omission had bad results, then you’re equally accountable. In Britain we have a legal system that is far worse than almost any in the world in terms of not calling people to account for failures to act, and this notion of wrongdoing by omission radically changed my life. I stopped saying to myself, ‘Have I kept out of trouble today?’ and started saying to myself: ‘If I’ve got three score years and ten, how do I want to make the world a better place?’ I don’t think we use that anywhere near enough in our assessments of politicians and celebrities and rich people and leaders. We only ask that they keep their noses clean and manage not to say anything racist or sexist, rather than what they have done, or failed to do, with their power, wealth, status and influence. I know, but he invented it. What’s clear is that the higher up the social scale you are, and the more security you’ve got, the more obliged you are to use that status and safety for the good. Aristotle was very hard on the rich who didn’t do something of a constructive kind with their money. This is a man who’d had to live in Philip of Macedon’s court. He watched some of the worst behaviour in the Greek world. And in the Nicomachean Ethics , when he’s talking about financial meanness, he uses some of his most bitter language. Exactly. And that’s like his other extraordinary idea of dynamis , of potential. Everything has potential. Even bits of wood and stone have the potential to become statues or parts of a temple. But in the case of the human being, fulfilling your full physical, intellectual, and creative potential and doing that as an activity all the time, not just getting to that state and stopping, is inseparable from eudaimonia . That’s exactly what it is. In a sense, you and I are in a state of eudaimonia right now because we are doing what we enjoy most and have therefore become reasonably good at—talking about ideas. I talk about this in the book; I’ve been very lucky. I had a socialist-Aristotelian mentor, an admirable woman called Margot Heinemann, a professor of English. I was really at a loss in my mid-twenties. I hadn’t decided to do a doctorate; I did it quite late. She had me in for an hour, and told me: ‘Write down everything you can do and then tell me what you’re doing to do it with. ’ She was an old Marxist, so she just said ‘okay, you can’t go into politics. You’re far too emotional for the political plane. You’re not properly working class, so you can’t work on the economic plane. So, go and work on the ideological plane’. I said: well, how do I do that?’ She said: ‘You’ve got a brain. You’ve got a first-class degree. For heaven’s sake, isn’t it obvious that you need to go and be an academic?’ Isn’t that brilliant? I was lucky because I had someone who was capable of good mentoring and cared. How many kids don’t have an adult like that in their lives? She did that for me and I think we should be doing that for all our young. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . My second chapter is all about dynamis . The term is where Alfred Nobel got the name for his original blasting powder, which I hate because it’s such a constructive word. I wanted to call my book Aristotelian Dynamite and the publisher wouldn’t let me. But the real dynamite is in every human on the planet."