Aristotle – How to live a good life

Happiness is not an emotion. That was the whole point of the article.

A nuke can be good considered in itself (effective at leveling a city), and bad considered in relation the person who presses the button and thereby commits mass murder.

It is the latter that makes nuking a city a bad deed.

> My criticism of Aristotle: Living the golden mean, like a happy person isnt going to help when your country is invaded.

An interesting criticism considering Aristotle elevated soldiers at war as a prime example. Greek philosophy was generally done by and for noble men, who were expected to deal with war on a regular basis and often actively participate in it.

> Aristotle's golden mean (or Temperance) does not account for this.

Aristotle gives the example that soldiers should be temperate in their enjoyment of war, not reveling in the bloodshed or pushing farther than they can handle. Work and studies are the same way: regardless of your age the human body has limits that you need to account for. When you're younger you can push past some of the softer limits (stay up late, go without food, etc) but eventually you will hit hard physical limits that, if not respected, will cause irreversible damage and often put you in a worse spot than you started.

> "But Wisdom would say that this is acceptable to sacrifice health at points" Does it? How do you weight these virtues as one better than another?

To directly answer: Aristotle does say Practical Wisdom (or Prudence) is the highest of the cardinal virtues, and that the cardinal virtues of Prudence,Courage,Temperance, and Justice are more important virtues than others.

But that's also sort of the whole point of his ethics, you don't have specific rulings of what to do, you develop the character to make the right decisions for the given circumstance. In this case, you rely on good Practical Wisdom to determine what the moderate amount of work is: a wise person wouldn't slack off at work but also wouldn't work 80 hour weeks at the expense of seeing their family.

> Calling for some perfect Platonic form that answers all these questions correctly is a bit of a cop-out.

You'll have to take that up with his teacher I suppose.

He may well mean a mechanic qua mechanic is not capable or practising virtue -- not a mechanic qua human being.

The ancients tended to predicate formally where we predicate materially. When they said 'a mechanic can't practise virtue', they didn't mean every man who is a mechanic, which is what we would mean. They meant every mechanic in so far as he is a mechanic. At least this is the tendency -- I don't know if it applies to this particular case.

In this case, it would mean he can't practise virtue, at least not complete virtue, through being a mechanic, but he could in other areas of his life.

Jacques Maritain's Introduction to Philosophy explains this helpfully.

One thing you have to notice is the centrality of the nature of a thing, which is to say its telos, or end. Fulfillment is, after all, defined by our nature; it is a matter of proceeding from potential to actuality, as determined by our nature. What is good advances a person according to one's nature (in our case, human nature), what is bad acts against it. Telos, or finality, also gives morality its proper and objective ground: what is morally right or wrong follows, ultimately, from one's nature. Since we are humans, we are therefore persons, which is to say animals who can understand their actions and choose between apprehended alternatives, and therefore moral agents. We must therefore choose to act in accord with our nature as free and rational agents, which is to say according to right reason. Our rationality allows us to tackle the question of what it means to be human and to therefore determine what is good.

A tragedy of the crudeness of materialism is that it obliterates telos, and in doing so, destroys the only possible objective ground for morality and the good. Married to philosophical liberalism, morality becomes a mystery cult rooted in desire that evades explanation. Yyou cannot square the existence of desires--which can be good or bad, in accord with reason, or deviant or depraved--with a purely materialist universe; even Descartes had to tack on the disembodied ghost of the Cartesian mind to account for all sorts of phenomena. So you end up with an irrational gnosticism as a result.

But the fact of the matter is that even the most mundane varieties of efficient causality presuppose telos, as telos is not the same as conscious intent (which is a particular variety), but fundamentally, the ordering of a cause toward an effect. The only reason efficient causality is intelligible at all is because the relation between cause is ordered toward an effect by virtue of the nature of the thing, and not arbitrarily related. Striking a match predictably results in fire, not nothing, nor the appearance of the Titanic or whatever.

We are seeing an increased, if modest interest in broadly Aristotelian thought (which some refer to as "Neo-Aristotelian"), however. As the materialist dinosaurs pass from this earth, fresh blood is willing to reexamine the nihilistic, dehumanizing, materialist dogmas of the last two or three centuries. It was never the case that materialism overthrew the prior intellectual tradition by discrediting it. Rather, it began with the perilous decision to "start from scratch". Putting aside the dubiousness of the notion, what we can expect from starting from scratch is a repetition of the same errors. There are eerie similarities between modern ideas and the pre-Socratic philosophers, for example, of which Aristotle was very much aware and to which he was responding.