Reading --Aristotle -- Nicomachean Ethics

Question 1

Aristotle – Nicomachean Ethics

Answer 1

Aristotle – Nicomachean Ethics – Aristotle (384–322 bce) was one of the world’s greatest and most influential philosophers. He was a pupil of Plato but disagreed sharply with many of Plato’s doctrines. His works cover a huge variety of topics, from ethics, politics, and rhetoric to metaphysics and even biology.

BOOK 1: THE HUMAN GOOD:

• If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else clearly this must be the good and the chief good.
• What is the highest of all goods achievable by action.
• It is happiness, identify living well and faring well with being happy.
• But with regard to what happiness is they differ, and the many do not give the same account as the wise.
• The former think it is some plain and obvious thing, like pleasure, wealth, or honour;— and often even the same man identifies it with different things, with health when he is ill, with wealth when he is poor; but, conscious of their ignorance, they admire those who proclaim some great thing that is above their comprehension.
• Some thought that apart from these many goods there is another which is good in itself and causes the goodness of all these as well.

Let us again return to the good we are seeking, and ask what it can be.– It seems different in different actions and arts. In medicine this is health, in strategy victory, in architecture a house and in every action and pursuit the end; for it is for the sake of this that all men do whatever else they do.

• Therefore, if there is an end for all that we do, this will be the good achievable by action.
• Clearly not all ends (ends = Goals) are final ends; but the chief good is evidently something final. Therefore, if there is only one final end, this will be what we are seeking.
• We choose honour, pleasure, reason, and virtue for the sake of happiness, judging that through them we shall be happy.
• Happiness, on the other hand, no one chooses for the sake of these, nor for anything other than itself.

The Final Good Is Thought to be Self-Sufficient. – That which when isolated makes life desirable and lacking in nothing; and such we think happiness to be; and further we think it most desirable of all things, not a thing counted as one good thing among others.

Happiness, then, is something final and self-sufficient, and is the end of action.

• For just as for a flute-player, a sculptor, or any artist, and, in general, for all things that have a function or activity, the good and the “well” is thought to reside in the function, so would it seem to be for man, if he has a function.
• The function of man to be certain kind of life, and the function of a good man to be the good and noble performance of these.
• If this is the case, human good turns out to be activity of soul exhibiting virtue.

But we must add “in a complete life.” For a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.

Those who identify happiness with virtue.

• For to virtue belongs virtuous activity. For one who has the activity will of necessity be acting, and acting well.
• Those who act win, and rightly win, the noble and good things in life.
• The lovers of what is noble find pleasant the things that are by nature pleasant; and virtuous actions are such, so that these are pleasant.
• The man who does not rejoice in noble actions is not even good; since no one would call a man just who did not enjoy acting justly.
• If this is so, virtuous actions must be in themselves pleasant.

Happiness then is the best, noblest, and most pleasant thing in the world.

• It needs the external goods as well; for it is impossible, or not easy, to do noble acts without the proper equipment.
• There are some things the lack of which takes the lustre from happiness—

Happiness is an activity of soul in accordance with perfect virtue.

Virtue distinguished into kinds –

INTELLECTUAL – Philosophic wisdom and understanding and practical wisdom being intellectual

MORAL – Liberality and temperance moral.

• For in speaking about a man’s character we do not say that he is wise or has understanding, but that he is good-tempered or temperate.
• Yet we praise the wise man also with respect to his state of mind; and of states of mind we call those which merit praise virtues.

BOOK II: MORAL VIRTUE:

Virtue, then, being of two kinds, intellectual and moral.

INTELLECTUAL VIRTUE – Owes both its birth and its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and time)

MORAL VIRTUE – Comes about as a result of habit.

• None of the moral virtues arises in us by nature; for nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to its nature.
• Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit.
• All the things that come to us by nature we first acquire the potentiality and later exhibit the activity it was not by often seeing or often hearing that we got these senses, but on the contrary we had them before we used them; but the virtues we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well.
• The thing we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.
• By doing the acts that we do in our transactions with other men we become just or unjust.
• Thus, states of character arise out of like activities. This is why the activities we exhibit must be of a certain kind.
• It makes no small difference, whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth; all the difference.

GOLDEN MEAN – It is the nature of such things to be destroyed by defect and excess.

• So too is it with the virtues; by abstaining from pleasures we become temperate, and it is when we have become so that we are most able to abstain from them; and similarly too in the case of courage; for by being habituated to despise things that are fearful and to stand our ground against them we become brave, and it is when we have become so that we shall be most able to stand our ground against them.
• For moral virtue is concerned with pleasures and pains; it is on account of the pleasure that we do bad things, and on account of the pain that we abstain from noble ones.
• Hence we ought to have been brought up in a particular way from our very youth, as Plato says, so as both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought.
• Again, if the virtues are concerned with actions and passions, and every passion and every action is accompanied by pleasure and pain, for this reason also virtue will be concerned with pleasures and pains.
• The question might be asked, what we mean by saying that we must become just by doing just acts, for if men do just and temperate acts, they are already just and temperate, exactly as, if they do what is grammatical or musical, they are grammarians and musicians.
• A man will be a grammarian, then, only when he has both done something grammatical and done it grammatically; and this means doing it in accordance with the grammatical knowledge in himself.
• If the acts that are in accordance with the virtues have themselves a certain character it does not follow that they are done justly or temperately.
• The agent also must be in a certain condition when he does them
• In the first place he must have knowledge.
• Secondly he must choose the acts, and choose them for their own sakes.
• Thirdly his action must proceed from a firm and unchangeable character.
• • Actions, then, are called just and temperate when they are such as the just or the temperate man would do; but it is not the man who does these that is just and temperate, but the man who also does them as just and temperate men do them. TJB– In other words- You can’t just ACT** just, you must **BE just.
• But most people do not do these, but take refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers and will become good in this way, behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do none of the things they are ordered to do.
• Thus a master of any art avoids excess and defect, but seeks the intermediate and chooses this—the intermediate not in the object but relatively to us.
• For instance, if ten is many and two is few, six is the intermediate, taken in terms of the object; for it exceeds and is exceeded by an equal amount; this is intermediate according to arithmetical proportion. But the intermediate relatively to us is not to be taken so; if ten pounds is too much for a particular person to eat and two too little, it does not follow that the trainer will order six pounds; for this also is perhaps too much for the person who is to take it, or too little—too little for Milo [a wrestler], too much for the beginner in athletic exercises.
• We often say of good works of art that it is not possible either to take away or to add anything, and good artists, as we say, look to this in their work.
• Virtue must have the quality of aiming at the intermediate.
• For instance, both fear and confidence and appetite and anger and pity and in general pleasure and pain may be felt both too much and too little, and in both cases not well; but to feel them at the right times, with reference to the right objects, towards the right people, with the right motive, and in the right way, is what is both intermediate and best, and this is characteristic of virtue.
• Virtue is a kind of mean, since, as we have seen, it aims at what is intermediate.
• Virtue, then, is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e. the mean relative to us, this being determined by reason, and by that reason by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it.
• It is a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on defect
• And again it is a mean because the vices respectively fall short of or exceed what is right in both passions and actions.
• Not every action nor every passion admits of a mean.
• E.g. spite, shamelessness, envy, and in the case of actions adultery, theft, murder.
• Imply by their names that they are themselves bad, and not the excesses or deficiencies of them.
• It would be equally absurd, then, to expect that in unjust, cowardly, and self-indulgent action there should be a mean, an excess, and a deficiency.
• It is no easy task to be good.
• Anyone can get angry—that is easy— or give or spend money; but to do this to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with the right motive, and in the right way, that is not for everyone, nor is it easy;