Oh Aristotle – where can we possibly begin? This is my first time writing about one of the most important written works in the Western canon, and maybe THE most important work on ethics ever written… and I must admit it’s a wee bit intimidating. I am of course referring to Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle. That being said, my goal here is not to recount a point by point analysis of each of the ten books that make up this Mount Everest of philosophical tomes, as that has already been done a thousand times by scholars and amateurs much more astute than myself. Instead, I would like to use this mostly as a personal exercise, to see if I can can come full circle with the popular opinion that Aristotle’s Ethics, is truly the godfather of every self help book ever written.
Now if you were taking an exam on Nicomachean Ethics you might be asked to go into the specifics of defining equity vs equality or phronesis vs nous, corrective justice vs distributive justice and so on. However, as I said before I like to spend a little time generalizing my thoughts on the main focus of the work, as it would apply to someone in the modern age who would read it for it’s prescriptive self-help properties.
But, let us take a step back for a moment and let me ask a question that is maybe the essential foundational question of ethics that philosophers have attempted to answer for thousands of years: Why should I do the morally right thing?
It is only from this particular question that we as human beings subsequently attempt to develop our own understanding of ethics and how it applies to our own lives given that there is no one universal, consensual answer to this question. Let us however focus on the primary ethical argument that Aristotle lays before us in an attempt to answer the previous question by examining 2 (in my opinion) of the most important concepts in Nicomachean Ethics.
1. Happiness (Eudaimonia)
2. Virtue (Arete)
And here we have one of the more poignant statements Aristotle makes in Book 1 of Ethics:
“If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this), and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else (for at that rate the process would go on to infinity, so that our desire would be empty and vain), clearly this must be the good and the chief good.”
Here Aristotle is saying that there MUST be an ultimate good, there must be something that humans desire for its own sake. Luckily for us Aristotle tells us only two sections later in section four of Book 1 what that thing is and gives us his answers to the question of why we (human beings) should do the morally right thing?
And what is the million-dollar answer? Well it’s simple and something everyone can relate to: Happiness.
But, what’s the rub? Humans might agree that happiness is something that everyone wants for its own sake, however there is widespread disagreement as to what happiness actually is for each individual. Is it pleasure, honor, wealth, possession of virtue? In our modern sensibilities we might consider happiness to be an indescribable combination of all of those things, and in fact many of our modern self help books focus on achieving individual goals in order to achieve happiness as a state but that is not necessarily what Ethics is proposing. It is here we come to the crux of Aristotle’s ethical view of happiness:
“Happiness, then, is something final and self-sufficient, and is the end of action.”
Ok so let me refocus to the question at hand: Is Nicomachean Ethics a book worth reading AND can it really be considered a self-help book for the modern reader? Well… in my opinion it depends on how we define self-help. Allow me to make a gross generalization, and I must make one as I am certainly not an expert on modern self help literature, and there is of course an outstanding range of books that could fit into this category. That being said I would surmise that the overwhelming majority of these types of self-help books focus on changing your behaviors or actions in order to attain a life or lifestyle that then ideally bring you happiness and it’s here were I see the big difference between this work of philosophy and our modern ideas of happiness. That is because Aristotle makes the point that it is not focusing on achieving particular results in order to become happy, but rather the state of happiness is the means in itself and not a means to be achieved. Only through consistent virtuous action throughout our whole life that can we live in this state by constantly trying to navigate the mean of life’s extremes.
Great review! I loved it