I was struck by the negative reaction I had to rereading this book (which I’d first read in college).
I say that because I like Aristotle. I have written before about my evolution from youthful Platonic idealism to a more sober, nuts-and-bolts Aristotelian realism. I love in particular Aristotle’s method of classification, his sensitive and acute separation of a thing into its (many!) categories, parts, or types. That’s a method that I’ve wholeheartedly adopted into my own thinking in the last five years. It’s an approach focused on specificity, above all: the notion that the truth is to be found by sifting through the details, by inductive reasoning, by taking everything apart, studying and classifying it, and then putting it back together into some kind of wider and higher system of understanding, moving ever-upward toward truth.
And that’s why I think I reacted so negatively to rereading this book – because I was surprised when Aristotle, after such a promising start, makes such a monumental error in logic – one which, now that I’ve noticed it, changes the way I see his entire famous work.
What is this error of logic? It is this:
Aristotle’s main goal in the Ethics is to define the human good and to explain how it is attainable for humans. After some admirable ground-setting – including a gratifying dismissal of the expansive and mystical Platonic definition of The Good as ever-lasting, eternal (and totally incomprehensible!), Aristotle concludes that the ultimate human good, the ultimate goal we all wish to strive for – the only one we aim for as a good-in-itself – is happiness, eudaimon in Greek (often explained as a “a life well-lived” or “the good life”). Again, I find this conclusion admirably commonsensical, appropriate, hard to disagree with.
And yet it is here that Aristotle falls prey to a logical fallacy – a non-sequitur – in his argument. Instead of directly investigating the conditions, components, or circumstances that make men the most happy, Aristotle makes a secondary argument, often called the Function Argument. The best way, says Aristotle, to identify what will bring humans most happiness is not to consider that which makes the majority of humans most enduringly happy, but by identifying the essence of human beings – that which makes us different from animals – and then finding ways to exercise or cultivate those faculties. Except that Aristotle doesn’t use the word “essence”; he uses the word “function” – we must locate the function of human beings. That and only that will direct us toward the true path to happiness for humans.
So here is the non-sequitur syllogism:
- Humans have a highest goal that they aim at – happiness
- Humans have a characteristic that makes them different from other species (a “function”) – reason
- Therefore fulfilling our core function – using reason really well – will achieve our highest goal of making us happy.
This is called, according to the scholarship I found, the Function Argument. You can see the non-sequitur: It simply does not follow that there is any relation between our core “function” (which is in itself a highly debatable formulation) and our happiness.
Think about it: If my “function” – or that which I am best at or that which makes me unique – is being a professional educator, it’s not logical to conclude that the key to my being happy is to be really good at teaching. Yes, that’s surely one of the elements that will encourage happiness – and surely an important one – but not the only one. It is even debatable, I think, whether possessing excellence at something is inherently conducive to happiness.
I do think it follows that human reason will have an important impact on our happiness; clearly living a happy life is usually the result of being intentional about one’s choices, being awake to one’s needs, and of being deliberate how to fulfill those. But in my view the way to pursue the question of how to pursue the question of what the good life is would be to do the following:
- Ask what the highest goal to aim at is
- Ask what the best methods are to attain this goal
Aristotle does Step A, but skips Step B. Actually, I think he does touch it briefly in Books VIII and IX when he talks about friends. Suddenly he’s asking the question in Step B above, and “Humans need friends” is what comes to mind. But in the rest of the book, he’s not asking that question.
In my view, the rest of the book is asking a different question: “How do we live as *good* people?” This is different, of course, than asking “How do we live the good life?” The latter is asking about contentment and meaning and purpose. The former, which I believe Aristotle is really pursuing, is asking about how to behave well, how to moderate one’s passions, how to treat others well, and how to regulate one’s conduct according to reason. It’s as though Aristotle is really making something similar to the argument Socrates was trying to make in the Republic, that living a life according to morality or to justice is actually pleasurable in itself.
Strangely, I found the same problem with Aristotle’s argument here that I did with Karl Marx’s (and Paolo Freire’s) regarding their understanding of human nature, and the political assumptions that they drew from it. As I read these two thinkers, they too made the “function argument” and as a result, found themselves (in my view) on the wrong side of the is-ought divide. Marx, in particular, I read as taking a particular slice of human essence – man’s ability to shape his environment with conscious intent – and considering it as the totality of human nature, the “function” – just as Aristotle did with reason. Marx then set out to construct a political society based around actualizing this function, with the goal of using political structure to turn the material conditions toward something more hospitable for humans to flourish according to their “function.” I read Freire as taking a similar path by using education (he called the goal of developing this “function” in man “humanization”).
The problem with these function arguments for me is that they are making a normative case for the right goal of human beings (what they “ought” to be doing), rather than a purely descriptive case (what “is” true about what makes them happy, fulfilled, etc.). This all culminates in Aristotle’s contention in the final book of the Ethics that the best and happiest life is the contemplative life, a conclusion I think most people would find unlikely. Aristotle makes several interesting arguments on behalf of this point, but I don’t find them compelling, largely because they seem to me the epitome of an “ought” argument rather than an “is” argument. “If happiness is activity in accordance with virtue,” he writes, “it is reasonable that it should be in accordance with the highest virtue” (263). In defending this idea, he makes to my mind a very un-Aristotelian point: “But we must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us” (265). While I appreciate this as an exhortation to develop what’s best about ourselves, the focus here on the divine rather than the human is a strange note for a realist like Aristotle to strike (especially in a book quite self-consciously devoted to understanding the good for man). And nowhere is his focus on a normative rather than descriptive understanding of human happiness more evident than here. Happiness is not just the activity of our innate virtues, but, at its best, is something just beyond human – we must “strain every nerve” and try to be something beyond our usual selves. This seems to me a pure expression of “ought.”
Let me be clear, however, that I find Aristotle’s account of the good life very compelling – when read as a how-to manual on how to *be* good. His basic idea is that human beings are composed of (in our “soul” as he says – an old term, but an easy one to understand) three parts: the vegetative, the affective, and the calculative, and that reason governs the calculative and half of the affective. His basic thesis is that our lives will be better – more enjoyable, and more fulfilling – when we use reason and conscious intent to control our intellect (the calculative part), and our emotions and passions (the affective part). Being really good at doing so means that you have “excellence” – translated as “virtue.” (This was a point of confusion for me at first, because “virtue” has taken on such a different meaning as a result of Christianity – but he really means “excellence” when he says “virtue.) And so Aristotle defines happiness as an activity of the soul in accordance with reason and virtue, manifested over a whole lifetime.
The main issue I see is that he makes no attempt to justify the specific virtues that he includes. I like his inclusion of courage, justice, temperance, and pride, but there are surely others he does not include. What about charity, loyalty, or empathy? Some of the ones he does include feel minor, or oddly specific – like the virtues dealing with money. Still, I mostly like the ones he includes, and it’s hard to argue with either 1) His classic statement of virtue as aiming at the mean, and 2) His classically Aristotelian formulation that there’s no rule governing how to attain the mean – that it is in fact deeply situational and contingent, and guided by practical wisdom. I seem to remember a B-grade, possibly made-for-TV version of The Odyssey that had Odysseus repeating to Telemachus a line straight out of this section of the Ethics as justification for waiting on his revenge on the suitors: “Remember, Telemachus, to be angry at the right man, at the right time, for the right reasons . . .” I always thought this sounded curiously academic – I have to wonder what screenwriter thought that importing sober, rational Aristotle into a murder revenge scene was a stirring idea!
I also like Aristotle’s famous argument that intellectual virtues are learned through education, but moral virtues are learned by habit, by doing them repeatedly. They are not natural, he writes, but we are “adapted by nature to receive them” (28). Above all, we become just not by learning about justice, but by doing just acts. I thought Aristotle did better explaining the moral virtues than the intellectual ones. He spends (in my edition) 110 pages on the moral virtues, but only 22 on the intellectual virtues. These, like the moral virtues, feel a little bit obscure in places, too.
As I alluded to above, I love Aristotle’s way of thinking – his endless categorization does get a little hard to follow, but I still like it as a mode of thinking and inquiry. I like, above all, his realism and his focus on identifying what the good is in the real world, and focusing on how we can use our knowledge not only to understand, but to live well.
As for the question of to what extent being a good person translates into living the good life, one of happiness and meaning – this is a rich question. Take away the notion that humans need to be good in order to make society work and focus instead just on the question of to what extent virtues as described by Aristotle are pleasant and meaningful. I actually do think that most of his virtues are connected to the good life – but by one further degree than Aristotle believed. It seems to me that although happiness requires activity – a pursuit, in some sense – it is still a psychological state, a feeling. Here I depart, perhaps, from Aristotle. And I do agree with him then that many of his elements help us achieve this state of happiness. It is difficult to be truly happy, I think, if one doesn’t have at least some measure of courage; without it, one is going to hide at home and never take the risk of approaching a potential romantic partner, of putting forth an opinion, of taking on a new and exciting job or role. And it does seem to me that in the end there is more lasting satisfaction and happiness in conducting ourselves with moral or appetitive excellence. Keeping yourself fit and only eating candy at specific times is, in the end, much more satisfying than binging on Fruit Rollups every night. There really *is* something to what Aristotle says about the use of reason being deeply satisfying in itself – the ability to have a plan that one wants to follow, and being able to execute it, see it through, and enjoy the rewards. There is a greater sense of satisfaction in seeing long-term projects or plans come to fruition in this way than there is in basic hedonism. In that sense, I do think Aristotle is right.
As I was reading this book, I kept thinking about how Aristotle’s account of living a happy life would align with Abraham Maslow’s famous Hierarchy of Needs. As I’ve said above, I’m not sure I find Aristotle’s account completely convincing when it comes to the necessary components for living a happy life. But when it comes to living as a good human being, Aristotle’s basic framework of virtue – excellence – in the rational governance of our moral and intellectual natures, through practice and instruction, aimed at hitting a situational golden mean, with a strong focus on treating ourselves and others well, is clearly a deeply foundational approach for the western tradition – and a difficult one to imagine bettering.
It’s an important and foundational, but what I take as Aristotle’s most basic logical fallacy at the heart of the work does make me hesitant.