Class Reflections: Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics books 1-2
what should we orient our lives around, if we want to be happy?
Last class session, we finished up by looking at examples of matters to which we could apply Aristotle’s analysis of the four causes - material, formal, efficient, and final - and I ended the class by giving them something to puzzle about. We are made up of all sorts of material: organs, blood, bones, various other systems. And there’s a form to those, a very complicated structure, lacking with be cease living and become medical waste. It’s not too difficult to identify what our efficient causes are (unless we were created in laboratories), namely two people getting it on, an egg getting fertilized and turning eventually into a baby. But what’s the final cause of a human being? Do we have a purpose or a function?
That is a question that Aristotle takes on in Nicomachean Ethics book 1, and one that I want my students to puzzle about rather than just get a simple straightforward answer to. It’s important to think about this. In some ways, they already are supplied to too many answers to this. What’s the point of a human life? What makes for a good or meaningful life? Already in Aristotle’s time, there were a lot of answers floating around out there in the culture, lots of people pushing or peddling their views on these matters. There are arguably more in our contemporary, more complicated society.
If you know much about Aristotle, which isn’t the case for anyone in my morning class session, you know that the answer he advocates is eudaimonia, a Greek term we often translate as “happiness” or if we want to be a bit fancier or clever, as “flourishing”. That’s what he thinks the well-functioning of a human being looks like. That’s what we are after, or at least should be seeking, the point of human existence. We have to determine what this actually means, of course, and the first thing we usually do in teaching this stuff, once we get this far along is to stress that the “happiness” we’re talking about isn’t some fleeting temporary mental state, but rather a more pervasive, lasting condition of our life.
That’s an important term that gets brought in: life. It’s not just that human happiness is something that is lived out and through, and extends itself over longer periods in our life. It’s also a product or reflection of the kind of life we live, and that means the kind of life that on some level we choose. And for Aristotle, that requires that we look at the kinds of good things that people tend to view as making their lives good, and orient their choices, their commitments, their priorities, their sacrifices around.
So for a second time in the semester, I ask my students what it is that they want out of life. What is it that they imagine will make their life a good one? What do they need and desire, in their heart of hearts? There are a fairly standard set of things they can be counted on to bring up as responses.
Wealth, income, property, or possessions
Friends, family, and other relationships
Meaningful work
Bodily health
Interests and hobbies
It’s quite interesting that with my Marquette students, they are typically a bit reticent to bring up several other very common matters that many people take as being part or even the whole of the good life, and which Aristotle explicitly addresses in his survey of what people take to be happiness or at least components of it.
One of these is pleasures, which at this point we have already discussed in several previous class sessions, specifically pleasures of eating and drinking, intoxicants, and sexual activity. One student in my afternoon class section did eventually bring these up, but none of them did in the earlier section.
Some of them will mention things like success or respect, and I steer that towards a contemporary term that corresponds to what in Aristotle’s works he calls “honor” (timē). I ask them if they don’t value social status. They generally do, but they’re reluctant to admit to that on their own. They’re quite comfortable, though, in saying that other people are often motivated by social status.
Then I bring up virtue or moral excellence (arētē). It’s not surprising to me that it doesn’t occur to them to identify being an actually good person, with good traits of character they have developed and can rely upon, when it comes to thinking about the nature of the good or the happy life. They’ve been raised in a culture that supplies them with all sorts of superficial, contradictory, wrong-headed notions of what it means to be a good person, or what developed traits make a person good. And they’re in even more of a muddle about what possible relationship there might be between being happy and being a good person. They’ve doubtless already been told “be good and good things will happen to you”, and then seen that there’s a real disconnect there.
In Nicomachean Ethics book 1, Aristotle argues that virtuous activity is essential to the happy life. Not just having virtue, but actually exercising it, living it out. He does also say that virtue by itself isn’t enough, that we need some modicum of wealth and a number of good relationships (and perhaps also decent bodily health), but the virtues remain front and center in his viewpoint. If you want to be happy, you need to develop some things that we have potential for but aren’t automatically there within us. You need to develop the virtues. And if you want to reliably develop them, then something else is also needed. You need to actually understand what virtue is and what its opposite(s) vice(s) is or are.
Next week, we will go through some of Aristotle’s much more robustly worked out analyses of what specific virtues are and what they involve. That’s also something we need, knowledge about what actual virtues look like, and the contrast between them and other dispositions that are vices. But just by way of example, we looked at a few of those today, specifically temperance and courage. It’s nearly always helpful with students to give them examples they can easily relate to.
So we discussed, for instance, how much ice cream is a reasonable amount to eat. A pint? Sure, that’s all right. That might be the right amount temperance would specify. Sitting on the floor, with a big spoon, digging into a gallon of ice cream, like people do in movies and TV shows after they experience a bad breakup? Not so good. Let that become a habit, and you’re on the way to the vice of self-indulgence.
How much of a 16 inch pizza should you eat? How many main dishes and how many desserts should you get at the all-you-can-eat buffet? These are the sorts of questions I raise for them in order to get discussion going. And in the process they come to see just how readily applicable Aristotle’s ideas are to their own lives, which, you might say, helps to make those real for them.
Coming back to the notion of purpose or function, the virtues as we see them through Aristotle’s eyes, are what allow us to realize that purpose, of enjoying a good life, of being happy, of flourishing. And in a way, they provide a partial answer to that question I left them with last class: what’s the point of your own existence?