I have begun a study of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. It will be the first time I have really turned to it since my college years, and maybe since spring of freshman year. My friend D, whom I speak with most of all about things like this, likened studying Aristotle to cutting through a jungle of falsehoods, but said that at least with Aristotle we get arguments, rather than cryptograms which lead to arguments (i.e. Plato). Having suffered through the Philebus (a book which bore the tantalizing subject of the relationship between the good and the pleasant, but which was so difficult I understood nothing), I am strongly inclined to agree. Right where you want clarity, Plato is needlessly, horribly obscure, and the obscurity is entirely artificial; purely a function of his manner of writing. Aristotle's difficulty is the interweaving of true and false arguments and a thoroughly dialectical structure; which means he's an entire level closer to speaking his mind with you than is Plato.
So I'm going through the first book of the Ethics slower and more thoroughly than I've ever gone through a book in my life, and I can't say it's unpleasant. Whether the good is pleasure, honor, or contemplation (or as is more likely, something else Aristotle does not explicitly mention), what happiness is, and what the causes for happiness are - these are difficult and urgent questions for me. And when I take the trouble to read and reread, as Daniel did the Talmud and Freud, some measure of understanding does arise, and the pleasure that accompanies such understanding must be perceived in order to be understood.
The trouble, of course, is the same trouble that accompanies the study of most philosophers, and particularly ancient philosophers: the contradictions, the terrible arguments, the unhelpful rhetoric, and almost total lack of good teaching. It makes discovering the philosopher's genuine teaching and distinguishing it from their opinions exceedingly difficult, to say nothing of the difficulty of deciding if these teachings are actually true.
And Book One is a labyrinth. A labyrinthine jungle. Circular, organic structure, hidden false arguments, open contradictions, subtle contradictions, pandering to the prejudices of his day, and I could go on. Every chapter must be read on its own and then compared with every other chapter in that book. The amount of work required is daunting, even discouraging. For one with little confidence in his own powers, the temptation to give up and rely upon the opinions of others is strong, very strong.
I am resolved not to do that. Granted, D has helped me very much, but I have to do my own work as well. My foray into Book One has revealed some of the main thrusts of the argument: the importance of the good, what the good is, the definition of happiness, how the arguments for happiness contrast with those of the good, and how the three ways of life (pleasure-seeking, honor/power loving, contemplative) stack up against human desire. The ranking of goods and virtues is also critical, so naturally Aristotle does almost none of that.
The most important sections in Book One are probably chapters six and seven. Six is hard, so I basically skipped it as a freshman - I read its pages, but I read them with zero understanding. They will form the crux of a paper I want to have written by Advent on the good and happiness in Book One. They will also be read with the following questions in mind (as will, to a similar extent, mutatis mutandi, all of Book One): What is the good? What is happiness? Are Aristotle's arguments for them sufficient or not? He rejects a universal idea of the good - can the same objection be leveled against the universal idea of happiness? Why is the artistic/poetic life absent in his schema? What is the role of pleasure in happiness and the human good (the question for me right now)? Goods and virtues ought to be explicitly compared and contrasted: are they? If they are, are they compared satisfactorily? Is Aristotle a mathematician, a rhetorician, a geometer, or a carpenter?
I have a sinking feeling that I will be spilling a lot of digital ink on Book One. But if I want to genuinely understand, it's probably the quickest way. This means yet another commentary. And the trouble with commentaries on esoteric writings of philosophy is that they get exponentially more complicated the further they get. The advantage is that I will be able to see the contours of the work's structure much more easily having gone through work like that, so the largely mediocre writing I'm about to produce won't be entirely without fruit. I will begin with Book One of course, but I will try and follow the dialectical contours of the argument and pause at each major change or development as I see them. I will try to keep my writing simple, direct, and strive to always speak from my own experience. I will place as few barriers as possible in the way of understanding. So in a way, I will be the anti-Plato, the anti-Aristotle.
Let us begin.
So I'm going through the first book of the Ethics slower and more thoroughly than I've ever gone through a book in my life, and I can't say it's unpleasant. Whether the good is pleasure, honor, or contemplation (or as is more likely, something else Aristotle does not explicitly mention), what happiness is, and what the causes for happiness are - these are difficult and urgent questions for me. And when I take the trouble to read and reread, as Daniel did the Talmud and Freud, some measure of understanding does arise, and the pleasure that accompanies such understanding must be perceived in order to be understood.
The trouble, of course, is the same trouble that accompanies the study of most philosophers, and particularly ancient philosophers: the contradictions, the terrible arguments, the unhelpful rhetoric, and almost total lack of good teaching. It makes discovering the philosopher's genuine teaching and distinguishing it from their opinions exceedingly difficult, to say nothing of the difficulty of deciding if these teachings are actually true.
And Book One is a labyrinth. A labyrinthine jungle. Circular, organic structure, hidden false arguments, open contradictions, subtle contradictions, pandering to the prejudices of his day, and I could go on. Every chapter must be read on its own and then compared with every other chapter in that book. The amount of work required is daunting, even discouraging. For one with little confidence in his own powers, the temptation to give up and rely upon the opinions of others is strong, very strong.
I am resolved not to do that. Granted, D has helped me very much, but I have to do my own work as well. My foray into Book One has revealed some of the main thrusts of the argument: the importance of the good, what the good is, the definition of happiness, how the arguments for happiness contrast with those of the good, and how the three ways of life (pleasure-seeking, honor/power loving, contemplative) stack up against human desire. The ranking of goods and virtues is also critical, so naturally Aristotle does almost none of that.
The most important sections in Book One are probably chapters six and seven. Six is hard, so I basically skipped it as a freshman - I read its pages, but I read them with zero understanding. They will form the crux of a paper I want to have written by Advent on the good and happiness in Book One. They will also be read with the following questions in mind (as will, to a similar extent, mutatis mutandi, all of Book One): What is the good? What is happiness? Are Aristotle's arguments for them sufficient or not? He rejects a universal idea of the good - can the same objection be leveled against the universal idea of happiness? Why is the artistic/poetic life absent in his schema? What is the role of pleasure in happiness and the human good (the question for me right now)? Goods and virtues ought to be explicitly compared and contrasted: are they? If they are, are they compared satisfactorily? Is Aristotle a mathematician, a rhetorician, a geometer, or a carpenter?
I have a sinking feeling that I will be spilling a lot of digital ink on Book One. But if I want to genuinely understand, it's probably the quickest way. This means yet another commentary. And the trouble with commentaries on esoteric writings of philosophy is that they get exponentially more complicated the further they get. The advantage is that I will be able to see the contours of the work's structure much more easily having gone through work like that, so the largely mediocre writing I'm about to produce won't be entirely without fruit. I will begin with Book One of course, but I will try and follow the dialectical contours of the argument and pause at each major change or development as I see them. I will try to keep my writing simple, direct, and strive to always speak from my own experience. I will place as few barriers as possible in the way of understanding. So in a way, I will be the anti-Plato, the anti-Aristotle.
Let us begin.
