I wanted to explain, before I get too deep into this project of a new podcast, precisely why I chose the title Mind and Desire. Where is that coming from? The answer is from a passage in Aristotle that impressed me so much already a long time ago, that I actually had a blog which bore a similar name but used Aristotle's Greek terminology.
So the blog was called Orexis Dianoetike, which can be translated in a lot of ways. Desire or affectivity that is informed by mind or is intellectual. And we'll talk a little bit more about ways of rendering this and just a bit.
And you might say, well, where does mind and desire come from? Well, there's a, you might say, flipped mirror image of that in the same passage that this came from. So the term is orektikos nous. And nous is the word for “mind”. Orektikos is coming from orexis, which means, very broadly speaking, desire or affectivity
So I had been using that as a title for a blog that I started a very long time ago, more than 10 years ago. And I really wanted to hold on to that. Now, why did I want to do that?
What was the attraction of it? It stems from, let's say, a broader picture that is conveyed by this passage of Aristotle. A broader picture, not just for Aristotle and Aristotelian ethics, and we could say a vision of human being, but rather of virtue ethics and philosophy as a way of life more broadly speaking. So it could also extend to the Stoics or the Platonists or later Christian thinkers, or even we could say, down to the present with people who aren't virtue ethicists as such but have similar points of view like existentialists.
So what is the passage that we're considering? Let me read it to you first in English. And this is the translation by Rackham, so it's a bit of an older translation, but it's also kind of standard. So this is from Nicomachean Ethics, Book 6, Chapter 2, where Aristotle says “choice may be called either thought related to desire or desire related to thought.”
Not too bad! Here's how the Greek runs and we'll go through that and then we'll kind of unpack it. So it's a fairly short. and concise passage, but there's so much packed in there.
One of the terms that you see there that we're translating as choice is prohairesis. And this is a really important term in Aristotle. He's one of the first people to use it in quite this way. And it can be translated as “choice” or the “faculty of choice”. Sometimes you'll see “deliberate choice”, “moral choice”, and it can signify the individual choices or commitments or priorities that we make, but it also signifies sort of a larger structure of our choices. And this is closely connected with virtue and vice and habits andall of these sorts of things that matter to us in moral life.
And it's not just reason imposes its dominion over the irrational, troublesome part or anything like that, that we can learn from our affectivity. And indeed, just a little bit earlier in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says, you know, thinking by itself doesn't actually get anything done. You actually need to have some affectivity involved with it. So this is really, really important.
Choice, moral choice, the faculty of choosing involves both thinking and desiring. It involves the intellect and it involves our feelings. Those things have to come together and in some respect be harmonized together if we're not going to be all screwed up, right?
So choice can be called thought related to desire or orektikos nous. So mind, thought that has an affective side to it, that's important. We often say, oh, we’ve got to get rid of our feelings. We need to take our emotions out of things. Aristotle would say, oh, be careful with that. That could actually be a bad strategy for being fully rational.
You don't have to be a computer. You don't have to take away all these things that make us distinctively human. We probably want to pay more attention to what we do with them.We probably want to pay more attention to what we do with them.
So, orektikos nous, thought related to desire, mind that has affectivity. And then on the other side, we have orexis dianoetike, desire related to thought, or you could say affectivity that is informed by thinking - for better or for worse, because not all of our thinking is always entirely well-informed or on point.
And so these are two sides of what it is that prohairesis or our faculty of choice actually is. And so you notice that the prohairesis is the linchpin. It is the joining. It is the center post between this higher rational part and this lower able to be influenced by rationality, but ultimately emotional, desirous, affective part.
Prohairesis is the place within us and within others where we can actually find focus, work on things, change the structure of our habits, develop ourselves in ways that can make us better or, for that matter, can make us worse if we're not careful.
What is it that I really like about this? That's part of what we need to lay out here. Why would I be attracted to this? I really like this idea that you see here in Aristotle and you do see it in other ancient thinkers and people all the way down to modern times that we have these important sides to ourselves that we have to give what's due to them, and we have to acknowledge as being important.
So making your life good, being a good person isn't just a matter of thinking the right thoughts and then forcing them as sort of a set of bonds or structures onto our unruly emotions or anything like that.
No, we actually want to pay attention to our emotions, to our desires and aversions, to the things that, as we often say, make us tick. They're just as important and just as real as our thought processes, as our ideas, as our assumptions. And where we really get a hold of this is in our capacity to choose, to commit ourselves, to make a choice and then have to follow through on that choice, to revise the choices that we're making, to take a new orientation or direction.
And that is what is there in this short little passage of Aristotle. So that is why I am so attracted to this point of view on human beings, which again, is in Aristotle, but you can also argue is in the Platonist tradition, the Stoic tradition, a lot of Christian thought, and people all the way down to the present.
And that is what made me originally want to call that blog Orexis Dianoetike, and much closer in time to call this podcast Mind and Desire.
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