The Nicomachean Ethics for Seekers

Dear reader — it is, kind of, but the lecture is the best-organized one anybody ever gave. The Nicomachean Ethics is a treatise in ten books by Aristotle on what the good life for a human being is and how to get it. What is happiness? What are the virtues of character? How do we choose well? What do friendship and pleasure add? What does the best life look like? And he goes about it by watching people, checking his claims against facts, and being willing to disagree with his own teacher.

The Guy

Aristotle was born in 384 BCE at Stagira, in northern Greece. At seventeen he went to Athens and spent twenty years at Plato's Academy. He later tutored the young Alexander of Macedon, and in 335 BCE he founded his own school, the Lyceum, in Athens. He died in 322 BCE. He wrote on logic, physics, biology, and more. And early in Book I he tells you what kind of argument to expect: "exactness must not be looked for in all discussions alike, any more than in all works of handicraft." Ethics deals with what's noble and just and admits variation, so the conclusions will be roughly true. That sets a tone: this is an outline, and he's up front about it.

Ten books in rough groups. Book I: the highest human good. Books II to V: the virtues of character. Book VI: intellectual virtue. Book VII: weakness of will and pleasure. Books VIII and IX: friendship. Book X: pleasure and the best life.

Book I: What Everyone's After

"Every art, and every science reduced to a teachable form, and in like manner every action and moral choice, aims, it is thought, at some good." That's the opening. Everyone agrees the highest good is called happiness. They disagree about what it is. He looks at three ways of life that stand out: the life of pleasure, the life in society that seeks honor, and the life of contemplation.

He takes up Plato's idea of one Good, the same in all good things. He says it's better to examine it, even though it's unpleasant because friends proposed it, because "where the safety of the truth is concerned," we have to be willing to upset even our own theories, "for since both are dear to us, we are bound to prefer the truth."

What the Chief Good must be like: final. Something we choose "for its own sake, and never with a view to anything further." We choose honor, pleasure, intellect for their own sake and for the sake of happiness, but nobody chooses happiness for the sake of those.

And the function argument. A carpenter and a cobbler have works. "Are we then to suppose, that while carpenter and cobbler have certain works and courses of action, Man as Man has none?" Eye, hand and foot each have a work, so does the whole person. Happiness turns out to be a working of the soul in accordance with excellence in a complete life. And the line everybody knows: "it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy."

It's an activity. A state of virtue can exist in somebody who's asleep, but a working can't. "As at the Olympic games it is not the finest and strongest men who are crowned, but they who enter the lists." Those who act win the prizes. Hold onto that.

Book II: You Are What You Repeat (The Most Readable Book)

Excellence comes in two kinds, intellectual and moral. Intellectual comes mainly from teaching and needs experience and time. Moral comes from habit, and the Greek word is a slight variation on the word for custom. No moral virtue is ours by nature. "By doing just actions we come to be just; by doing the actions of self-mastery we come to be perfected in self-mastery; and by doing brave actions brave."

The purpose isn't speculation: "we are enquiring not merely that we may know what virtue is but that we may become virtuous, else it would have been useless." He compares people who just talk about it to "sick people who listen to the doctor with great attention but do nothing that he tells them." And upbringing is huge: "whether we are accustomed this way or that straight from childhood, makes not a small but an important difference, or rather I would say it makes all the difference."

Then the mean. Virtue lies between extremes because things like this are spoiled by too much and too little, the way health is spoiled by too little or too much food or training. "The man who flies from and fears all things, and never stands up against anything, comes to be a coward; and he who fears nothing, but goes at everything, comes to be rash."

Virtue isn't a feeling (we're not praised or blamed for being afraid or angry, only for how we manage it) and it isn't a capacity. It's a state. And the mean isn't the arithmetic average: six between two and ten. It's relative to the person. If ten minae of food is too much and two too little, the trainer won't automatically prescribe six. "For Milo it would be too little, and for a man just commencing his athletic exercises too much." Milo being the famous wrestler. In each situation there's a right amount, a right time, a right person, a right way, and no formula for it. The virtuous person sees it.

And limits: some things have no mean. Malevolence, shamelessness, envy, adultery, theft, homicide. They're bad in themselves, not in excess.

Books III To VII: Choice, Justice, Wisdom, And Caving

Book III starts with responsibility. Praise and blame attach to what's voluntary. Involuntary acts come in two kinds: "done either on compulsion, or by reason of ignorance." Book V is justice, "the whole of virtue in relation to others," a moral state that gives the capacity to do what's just, actually do it, and wish it.

Book VI is the intellectual virtues, especially practical wisdom, phronesis. We find out what it is by asking who we call practically wise. That person can "deliberate well respecting what is good and expedient for himself," not in some narrow line but toward living well overall. This is the guy Aristotle defines virtue by: a state determined by reason as the practically wise man would determine it. Not a theorist, someone who can see what's good in the actual case.

Book VII has three things to avoid in character: vice, imperfect self-control, and brutishness. That's the weakness-of-will chapter, which is exactly what it sounds like.

Books VIII And IX: Friends

He gives friendship more room in ethics than almost any ancient philosopher. It's a virtue or close to one and "the bond of Social Communities, and legislators seem to be more anxious to secure it than Justice even." No one would choose to live without friends, he says, even with every other good thing. The rich and powerful need them most, since prosperity without people to share it is useless.

Three kinds, based on advantage, pleasure, and virtue. The first two are real but fragile; they end when the advantage or pleasure does. The third is the perfect kind, between good people who wish good to their friends for their own sake, and it lasts as long as they're good. "Rare it is probable Friendships of this kind will be, because men of this kind are rare." It also takes time. People can't be admitted to intimacy "till each has appeared to the other and been proved to be a fit object of Friendship." Those who rush into it are quick to wish to be friends but aren't.

Friendship helps the young keep from error, and the old in what weakness makes them liable to.

Book X: Pleasure And The Best Life

Back to Book I's question. If happiness is a working in accordance with excellence, it should be the highest excellence, that of the best part of us, the intellect. So happiness must be "a kind of Contemplative Speculation." The most continuous activity too: "we are better able to contemplate than to do anything else whatever, continuously."

But he adds we're human, so we need external goods: health, food, attention of all kinds. Not many, or great: "it must not be thought, because without external goods a man cannot enjoy high Happiness, that therefore he will require many and great goods in order to be happy." One real tension in the book is that Book I and the middle books present happiness as exercising the moral virtues in a political life, while Book X ends by calling contemplation the highest form. Scholars disagree about how those fit. I can't settle it for you.

The end of the Ethics: talk doesn't make people good. "Mere speculation and knowledge is not the end but practice." If talking and writing were sufficient to make people good, they'd deserve great rewards. But most people live at the beck and call of passion, so you need laws and upbringing.

Where It Went

In the thirteenth century, when his works came back to Western Europe in Latin translations, the Ethics became a central text of the university curriculum. Thomas Aquinas wrote a commentary and built his own moral theology on its structure. Medieval writers just called him The Philosopher. Then in the early modern period it came under attack along with the rest of Aristotle's authority. Protestant reformers, scientists, and philosophers like Hobbes, Hume and Kant grounded ethics in laws, consequences or duty, with less interest in character.

Then the comeback. In 1958 Elizabeth Anscombe argued that modern moral philosophy, with all its talk of obligation and rules, had lost the framework that made such talk make sense, and should go back to a philosophy of virtue. In 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue made a similar case.

To read it: the passages quoted here are from a nineteenth-century English translation on Project Gutenberg, formal and dated, with key terms capitalized. A modern translation will be clearer on the technical terms. It's dense, and reading straight through is discouraging. Start with Book I, chapters 1 to 7, then Book II, then the opening of Book VIII and the last chapters of Book X.