In Our Time - Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics

Episode Date: November 30, 2023

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Aristotle's ideas on what happiness means and how to live a good life. Aristotle (384-322BC) explored these almost two and a half thousand years ago in what became known as his Nicomachean Ethics. His audience then were the elite in Athens as, he argued, if they knew how to live their lives well then they could better rule the lives of others. While circumstances and values have changed across the centuries, Aristotle's approach to answering those questions has fascinated philosophers ever since and continues to do so.With Angie Hobbs Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of SheffieldRoger Crisp Director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, Professor of Moral Philosophy and Tutor in Philosophy at St Anne’s College, University of OxfordAnd Sophia Connell Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of LondonProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:J.L. Ackrill, Aristotle the Philosopher (Oxford University Press, 1981)Aristotle (ed. and trans. Roger Crisp), Nicomachean Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2000)Aristotle (trans. Terence Irwin), Nicomachean Ethics (Hackett Publishing Co., 2019) Aristotle (trans. H. Rackham), Nicomachean Ethics: Loeb Classical Library (William Heinemann Ltd, 1962)Jonathan Barnes, Aristotle: Past Masters series (Oxford University Press, 1982) Gerard J. Hughes, Routledge Guidebook to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Routledge, 2013)Richard Kraut (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2005)Michael Pakaluk, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2005)A. Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle's Ethics (University of California Press, 1981) Nancy Sherman, The Fabric of Character: Aristotle's Theory of Virtue (Clarendon Press, 1989)J.O. Urmson, Aristotle’s Ethics (John Wiley & Sons, 1988)

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. This is in our time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you can find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoyed the programme. Hello, what is happiness and how do we live a good life? Those are questions posed by Aristotle two and a half thousand years ago in what became known as a Nicomacian ethics.

His audience then were the elite in Athens, as if they knew how to lead their lives well, they could better rule the lives of others. And his approach to answering these questions has fascinated philosophers ever since in very different times. With me to discuss Aristotle's Nicomachian Ethics are Sophia Connell, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck University of London. Roger Crisp, Director of the Oxford Uhiro Center for Practical Ethics, Professor of Moral Philosophy and Tutor in Philosophy, at Nans College University of Oxford, and Angie Hobbes, Professor of the Public Understanding and Philosophy at the University of Sheffield.

Angie Hobbes, who was Aristotle and what was his reputation in Athens? Aristotle was born in 387 BCE, in Stegara in northern Greece. His father was the doctor at the Court of the Macedonian Kings. He was a best friend of Amantus II who was grandfather of Alexander the Great.

And Aristotle seems to have inherited his father's love of biology. When he was 17, Aristotle comes to Athens to study with Plato at the academy and he stays there for 20 years and he's hugely respected within the academy even though he and Plato disagree on quite a few things, they're close friends

and Plato has a lot of respect for him and he becomes far more than a student, he becomes a major researcher and in charge of the library there. Then when Plato dies in 347, There's a wave of anti-Macedonian feeling in Athens because of the rise of the Macedonian Empire. And Aristotle feels that it's prudent to leave. And he goes off for about five years in Assos on the coast of modern Turkey and in Lesbos,

conducting his philosophical researchers and a lot of biological investigations. But then he's invited by Philip II of Macedon to go back to Macedonia to be a tutor to a Alexander the Great, he does that. And then finally, in 335, he comes to Athens again, sets up his own Lyceum, his own research and teaching centre. But then in 323, after Alexander's death, yet another wave of anti-Macedonian feeling. He says, I don't want the Athenians to commit a second crime against philosophy, thinking, of course, of having them having put Socrates to death. And he goes off to you, the island of Ubeah, he dies there a year later. So hugely respected by intellectuals in Athens, very mixed feelings about him amongst the Athenians in general. Well, it doesn't get better than that, Angie, thank you very much. Now, the work we're discussing, why is it called what it's called?

The Nukomachian ethics? Well, Aristotle's father and his son were both called Nacomachus, so it's possible that he's dedicating this to them. it's also more likely, I think, that Nacomachus may have edited it after Aristotle's death. So we're not really sure about that name. Aristotle himself, when he's referring to the ethics in another work, the politics, he doesn't call it that, he just calls it Taethica, the things to do with character. And the actual title, Nekomachian ethics isn't used, I think, till about 170, 175 common era.

What we do know is that it's lecture notes. Of the works of Aristotle that have survived, only one is as written for publication. The rest are all lecture notes. It's condensed. It's elliptical. It's naughty. There are a lot of ambiguities. There are quite a few corruptions in the text. It takes quite a lot of concentration. Which you've given it over the years.

The other thing we definitely know about it, because Aristotle tells us, is that the ethics is written as a sort of the first part of a two-part work. It's to lead on to the politics because he thinks ethics is a branch of politics. Each time I turn to Roger, Chris. Roger, can you tell us what the ethics covers? Well, as Angie said, ethics means the things to do with character. So that's the overall topic. And the structure of the work is slightly odd, but essentially, I think, coherent.

So it's divided into 10 books. The first book is about the question we're trying to answer, which is what's the highest good, what's happiness, and the answer is it's got something to do with virtue. So that takes us into book two, which is about the virtues. And after a bit more on the virtues in book three, he starts talking about individual virtues. So I think it's important to remember

that a lot of the ethics has taken up with portraits of what it's like to live the virtuous life. That takes us to the end of book five. In book six, he talks about the intellectual virtues. In seven, he discusses some puzzles about weakness of will and throws in some chapters on pleasure. And we then have what could have been a separate treatise on friendship, which got sewn in, as it were, either by him or by Nicomacus or by somebody else.

And then finally, in book 10, well, he goes back to pleasure, and then he goes back to the issue of happiness, taking possibly a slightly different view on it than the one in the earlier books. What was he intending to do with these lectures? I mean, we know he was preaching or distributing them to the intellectual elite of Athens, but what did he hope would be the result of this?

He tells us his hope is that the lectures will help his listeners live happy lives, and these will be lives of virtue. many of them, as you say, are prom the elite all over what we would call Greece. And then he would have hoped that these people would go away, live happy lives in their own cities, take part in the politics of their own cities, and enable their fellow citizens to live happy and virtuous lives. You brought in virtue. A virtue is very as important as happiness, isn't it?

Completely, yes. You don't get one without the other. You don't get one without the other. Can we tell to you, Sophie? In what way does he build on Plato's? work? He develops certain ideas in Plato. Of course, Plato was heavily influenced by Socrates, and what we hear about Socrates in Plato's work is that the unexamined life is not worth living. And certainly Aristotle agrees with this and with virtue having something to do with knowledge, with living thoughtfully. So he's developing that. Another thing that he picks up on and

develops from Plato is the idea that we have three sets of motivations within us. Plato talks about the soul being divided between appetites, spirit, and reasoning. And broadly, Aristotle is in agreement and believes with Plato that it's a harmony of these parts of soul that is a huge part of what gives us a sense of well-being and makes our life go well. We need to align these motivations within us. If we don't, we'll feel conflicted, and that is a major source of unhappiness. Can you, do we see it with a direct line from Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, can you say something about that direct line if it was as direct line as I'm implying? Yes, so I mean there are three major figures in the development of ethics in Western philosophy,

and Plato is obviously influenced strongly by Socrates, although he is also in dialectic with Socrates. He's disagreeing with Socrates about various things. And the same is true of Aristotle. Aristotle's advance in a way is that although he's in agreement and on the same page in some ways with Plato, he is also arguing with him and developing from there ideas that are very different, which I can tell you about. So there's two things I think really different and innovative in the Nicomachean ethics. The first is that he disagrees with Plato.

that you should reform the way people breed and have families. So Plato in the Republic says, we need a community of people. Nobody belongs to anyone else. Your children aren't your children. There are everybody's children. And Aristotle disagrees vehemently with this and believes that ethics is centered in the affections you have for those people around you who include,

often include your family members, people in your immediate community, who you have close ties with, he doesn't want to break down the family, and family is going to be a part of the polis, and the polis is necessary for happiness. The other one is that he says there isn't, if we're doing practical philosophy, we want to learn how to live well.

It's no use talking about the good, the form of the good or the idea of the good, this completely abstract object. We don't know whether it exists, and we can't, even if we did find it, How would we apply that to everyday life? So Aristotle says what we need is actually to talk about how the good is said in many ways. The good is said in many ways because the good is an attribute of different things.

What we really want to find out about in ethics is the human good, not the good in the abstract. And that is where he pushes forward in book one to discover the human good. Can I come back to you, Angie? The final goal in human design action is Euda Manier. What is it? Yeah, literally Eudamanea means living under the guardianship of a beneficent guardian spirit. And in Aristotle, he defines it in book one as an activity of the psyche of the soul in accordance with excellence. It's because he's particularly interested, as we've been hearing, in the rational part of the human psyche,

he's particularly interested in our rational excellences, which are going to be varied. Why is he particularly interested in that? Does he say it once says we are the only species of plants don't have reason, animals don't have reason, human beings have reason? That's the distinction. Exactly, exactly.

It's what distinguishes us in Aristotle's eyes from animals and plants that we can reason. It's going to become a bit more complicated in book 10, but that's the gist. Now, so what we can say immediately is that it's mainly an objective concept. It's not particularly about feeling happy, though Aristotle's keen that we do feel happy,

but it's much more to do with the actualisation of our faculties, the fulfilment of our potential. You can flourish, you can possess eudaimenea, even if you're feeling pretty miserable that day. So that's something. He's also grounding it in human psychology and human biology. Again, I think we see the influence of his father there. He's trying to, to work with the grain. He's trying to make this a human good fit for humans. Though he does relent a little bit and he says that yes, it is mainly about the fulfillment of our best faculties, particularly our rational faculties, which are going to be connected with our intellectual and ethical virtues. But we do also need some external goods. He's a bit more kindly than Plato in that

respect. He allows us a few external goods because he says it's going to be very difficult to fulfil your potential if you're really poor or absolutely deprived of shelter or whatever. Thank you. Roger, is he talking about improving the individual or improving society as a whole? The ethics is certainly concerned with the individual. He's explicit about that and as Angie said at the end of the ethics, he leads us into the politics, which is a separate set of lectures or for us another book. So the aim is to speak to individuals in the ethics, but because the emphasis he places on the virtues

and because he thinks that the exercise of the virtues is carried out most effectively within politics, he is encouraging the individuals to whom he's speaking to further the well-being or eudaimeneer of their fellow citizens. Did he stand up and give these lectures? did he attract people to come and listen to these lectures? What effect, do we know anything about the effect they might have had at the time? Well, one possible clue is that we know that something like Plato's Republic, for instance,

was copied quite a lot pretty quickly and distributed around the Greek world. It ends up in the library in Alexandria not that long after Plato's death. With Aristotle, it seems to be different. There are his papyrus roles in his library. When he dies, he leaves them to Theophrastus, his friend and student. who then leaves them to somebody else. And eventually they seem to end up in modern Turkey, but in a cellar for about 150 years

because there's a threat of them being destroyed. And that's partly why Aristotle's texts are so corrupted because the original papy was sort of in a cellar, kind of in very adverse conditions. So it seems to me, and then eventually they are rescued and sent back to Athens, but it looks as if people are not copying out Aristotle's election notes and distributing them around Athens and elsewhere in Greece

in the way that we know Plato's works were. Is there any way? Left field question, Roger, and if we get nowhere, it does matter, because I question intrigues me. How come that in that small space, in that limited time, so many of the greatest philosophers lived and had such an influence, and what was going on. How did those fusions take place?

Well, I'm sure the full story would be quite complicated, but I do think it had a lot to do with Socrates. I think there was something about Socrates, which really was inspirational. The man going around asking people questions about the ability. Yes. So I think he really did get it going. And if anybody hasn't read anything by Plato,

I would recommend they look at the apology or the defence of Socrates. And that helps, I think, if you're trying to understand the Nikomakian ethics, because as I see it, to some extent, Plato and Aristotle were continuing the Socratic project. In the apology, it looks as if Socrates seriously believe that the only thing that can make you happy is virtue.

And that means you're secure, because nobody can take your virtue away if you are virtuous. It also means there's no needs to do anything wrong for the sake of getting money or power or anything like that. because those things wouldn't be worth having. Can you develop what he means by virtue? And you used the word excellence before, which I think is quite appropriate

as a translation for the Greek word aratee. But often when these three philosophers are talking about excellence, they mean what we would call moral excellence. But there is a puzzle in the Nekomachian ethics which arises at the end of the book because all the way along he seems to have been saying, well, if you want to be happy, you should live the life of virtue in the moral sense.

But then towards the end of the book, he says, oh, actually, maybe what you should do is contemplate and think and retreat from society and construct arguments and so on. And some people have seen that as making the book broken back, but I suspect myself that what he's saying is here's another way in which you can exercise excellence. And you have to make a judgment on whether it's the practical life or the intellectual life that's for you.

So, yeah, what does you see? as the function of humans? In book two, Aristotle seeks the function of a human being which has struck people as rather an odd endeavor. The reason he's doing this is because he's trying to specify more

clearly what Eudiamania is. Because at this point, everyone, he's found out that the many and the wise agree that the end of all our aims is Eudiamenea. This is what the human good is. But they disagree about what

kind of life that would be like. Is it the life of pleasure? Is it the life of honor? Or is it the life of wisdom? To try and discover what Eudiamine is, he has to look at what a human being is. And then he sets out a broader sketch of living beings. And very broadly, there are certain capacities that three sets of living beings have. Plants have the capacity to nourish themselves. Animals add in this perceptual capacity, but only human beings have logos, reason. And he doesn't mean that animals don't think in their own ways to figure out what to do, but it's humans that have a very special way of thinking, whereby they try to figure out what the best thing to do is. And this is part of what it is to be human. An animal doesn't have this capacity. An animal doesn't know right

from wrong. An animal can't be virtuous. They can't be vicious either. But human beings have this space, of reasons whereby they form their own values and they act within those values thoughtfully. And so he locates what it is to be a human being. And just like if you locate the function of an instrument, a tool, you can find out if that tool functions, if that tool is excellent, if it's a good tool. If you locate the function of a human, then you can find out if it's functioning well, if it's a good human. Andrew, I would like to know more about that particular subject. How to be human. It's quite a big question.

Well, as we've been hearing from Roger and Sophia, there are different kinds of rational excellence in Aristotle's book. And if we want to develop the excellences of character, then we need what he calls practical wisdom, phrenesis. And then there's also this thing called Théaria contemplation. of immutable and invariable truths, which he doesn't really return to until book 10. What he concentrates on for most of the ethics is phrenesis

and what's its role in achieving the virtues. The virtues are defined as mean points between excess and deficiency in respect of either feeling or action. So the idea is you use your practical wisdom to sort of moderate your responses to circumstances. And initially you have to build up your character by just simply repeating the correct actions through habituation. You achieve virtue through habituation.

But that's how you make progress. Exactly. That's how you make progress. You just keep on and on doing the correct thing. And eventually you'll come to understand why it's the correct thing. And that understanding, as Sophia was saying, is going to be what secures, what grounds your virtue. How are you sure that you're doing the correct thing?

Well, this is where it can get a bit circular because the test is what the good man, the sound man, would be doing. And you look to that person as your exemplar. In one sense, it's quite an empowering theory because it makes our character up to us. It's not in the lap of whimsical gods. It's up to us to develop our character. On the other hand, it's quite a tough doctrine because he's saying your character's up to you,

but beyond a certain point, you can't alter your character. However, even when you've settled your character, even when you've got a settled disposition, you can't just put your feet up. You've still got to go on actualising your reason and your rational potential every day. Eudonir flourishing and Aritaeer excellence, they're lifelong projects. They don't stop. They're activities, and they don't stop. Can we, Roger, can we develop the idea of the mean, please?

Yes, I think the mean has a lot more going for it than people have thought over the centuries. It's been the bust of lots of jokes because people think it's just a doctrine of moderation. Moderation was a big thing in Athens. And just saying to somebody, oh, be moderate in everything is slightly absurd. I mean, you wouldn't say that to a serial killer who's wondering how many people they should kill. It's a slightly extreme example, isn't. And I think it's quantitative. So the person who's courageous or brave will indeed feel the right amount of fear,

if it's required, maybe none at all. And somebody who's cowardly will tend to feel too much fear and so on. And then there's a kind of insensitivity where you don't feel enough fear. But I think it's important to recognise it's not just quantities that are coming into this. I think Aristotle's description of the virtues as means actually constitutes the best account of virtues that we have. What he'd seen is that human life can be separated into separate spheres, for example, to do with how much money you have and what you do with it,

certain emotions that you feel like fear or anger, and there's a right way to act and to feel in these fears. So the generous person will be the person who gives away the right amount of money. They'll also give it to the right people at the right time, for the right reasons, and so on, whereas the mean or stingy person won't do that. Okay, so you'll mean or stingy by not doing what the generous person would do. And you're wasteful or prodigal if you give away your money to the wrong people or at the wrong times and so on. And he's quite clear, actually, in his discussion of generosity that very often you can have both vices.

Because if you give all your money away, you're prodigal. Then somebody comes along who needs it. You haven't got any anymore. so you'll mean. Yes, I completely agree with what Roger was saying. It's an objective mean, but it's objective relatively to us, to our situation and to our context, isn't it? That's what makes it.

It's relative to our situation, yeah. But it's not relative to us in terms of how far along the path of virtue we are. No. There's a right way to do it. Exactly, exactly. Yes, it's not up to us to decide, you know, subjectively, whether we've got it right or wrong. but the mean point will not necessarily be the arithmetically middle point.

The mean point between 2 and 10 is mathematically 6, but that might not be the right number for you in terms of what you need to eat if you're an athlete and you might need to go much near it at 10. If you want to lose a bit of weight, you might want to go near it at 2. So it's objective, but it's relative to our individual circumstances. Yes. And it might be worth adding one thing, which is that it doesn't seem to work with all the virtues especially well, particularly justice. So some people think that Aristotle started as a botanist

and he certainly seems to have liked categorising things and he'd like theories. The mean was, this idea of the mean was around in Athens at the time in medicine and other spheres. So he wanted to get it into his theory and he did it very successfully. But then he tends, he seems to think, well, if it explains generosity and explains courage, it'll explain, for example, justice. and it seems not to do that because though there is a sphere of life concerned with justice you can't find a particular action or a particular feeling

that's governed by that virtue The wisdom you acquire is it practical or theoretical or both? Can you tell us what the as it were almost end result of it is? Most of the ethics is occupied with explaining

situations that require practical wisdom, phrenesis. And in book six, he gives us more explanation and detail about these practical wisdom, phrenesis, under the heading of intellectual virtues. There are character virtues on the one hand, which we've been hearing about all up until now, like generosity and courage. And then there are intellectual virtues like wisdom. But it turns out, even though we hadn't heard much detail about phrenesis yet, that it was required. for us to be, for any of the virtues. So to be virtuous, you must act and feel the right things, but on top of that, you have to have practical wisdom. You have to have decided to do the right

thing using this capacity, this intellectual virtue. Even in the original definition of virtue, he expresses it in terms of deciding to do the right thing based on reason and based on the type of reasoning that the practically wise person would undertake. The difference between that. Theoretical wisdom is that in this process of deliberation, you have to understand the particulars very well. You have to have a sensitivity to particular situations, particular feelings, how this particular action will affect your well-being and the well-being of others. Every single situation will be different. Angie, just for the sake of listeners, one of whom is myself, do you have any sympathy with people

listening to this program, I think, doesn't this apply to a different world? I think the basics actually are very user-friendly. He's saying that we all want to flourish, to feel eudaimeneer. He has an argument which some of us are persuaded by him. Others may not be that our eudaimeneer is achieved through the best possible fulfillment of our essentially human faculties, particularly our rational faculties, which has, we've been hearing from Sophia, lead us to both the ethical and the intellectual virtues. So he's saying, we need to understand what a human being is like and how human biology and psychology works before we can know what the human good is. I find that quite appealing.

Now, yes, when you get into the details of how does practical reasoning work, where I think many people today might take issue isn't so much of the technicality of it, but in the fact that in his notion of eudaimeneer, he has the notion of one human ideal, which we find out in the politics is basically the ideal of an adult, freeborn male. And there is therefore then a hierarchy of different levels, if you like, of flourishing and virtue going down from that eudaimeneer. And according to Aristotle, and again he says this more clearly in the politics, women just can't actualise their reason well enough to get to the top. Mentally disabled people, he sadly does not think capable of much, Eudiam and then very unfortunately he has a category of natural slaves, people he thinks who are born without the rational capacities to direct their own lives. Now, I imagine most of us, even if we're attracted to an ethics of Florida,

and virtue as I am, would take issue with this notion of a single hierarchy. And we would want to say, no, hang on, it's not the good, it's a good. There are different kinds of a good life. Roger, I'm not trying to do as a male. One male to another, we'll butt away as we can. How far do you think the virtue that you end up with is something that you inherited more than something you can study. Studying and practicing, yeah.

Yeah. Well, it has, yeah. I mean, ideally you will attend Aris Sittal's lectures and you'll leave his conclusions. And then you will habituate yourself into doing the right actions and feeling the right feelings. You may get some help from teachers along the way. He's quite open about the fact that it's a matter of chance

whether you'll be in a position to do that, as Angie said. For example, even if you are a male, but you're not very well off. That means there'll be certain virtues that you just won't be able to attain. You won't be able to be very magnificent going around fitting out ships for the Athenian Navy and putting on plays and so on.

But you will still be able to be generous. You'll be able to give away small amounts of money at the right time and in the right way and so on. Yes, I think the role of fortune or luck in Aristotle's ethics is a tricky one. And I do think that a certain recent scholars like Martha Nussbaum are on the right track when they say that we can understand ancient philosophy as among other things, an attempt to describe a way of life which is free from luck.

And I think Socrates himself provides that, and it's one of the reasons he's so cheerful at the end of the apology. He's going to die, but it doesn't matter because he'll still be, he'll still have lived the best life that was possible for him in those circumstances. You're immune from luck in that way. But luck will come in so far as you will be born into a certain gender, perhaps, or you'll be born into a certain

family with a certain amount of wealth. And that will determine whether you can flourish or not. It's just the way it is. Can I come back to you, Sophia? We haven't said anything really. One of the things that struck me quite a lot. It was friendship.

And the importance of friendship, the crucial importance of friendship, can you develop that? Aristotle says, nobody would choose to live without friends, even if they had every other good. And it turns out that friendship is not just important to happiness, it's necessary for happiness. There's a background in the sense that humans are social animals. If you had a human being on her own, that wouldn't be a human.

It would either be a beast or a god. Humans have to live together. They live together in political communities and political communities clubbed together to think about what is good for the, what is the common good. But Aristotle also thinks that happiness will make, it is very intertwined with virtue. And although I agree with Roger that the book seems to be written for individuals to read, I don't think friendship is left out even from the beginning. You are being virtuous towards other people and a lot of those people are people you have deep affectionate ties towards. When you are making decisions, you are

discussing your values, you're discussing the particular situation with the people around you who you care about. And Aristotle describes these friendships, these very important friendships, see terms character friendships, as complete. These are complete friendships. And in these kinds of friendships, the friend is another self. So that sounds like it could be selfish. You're like your friend because it's a bit like you. and you quite like being somebody who's like you. Well, Aristotle is very clear that there's a distinction between being selfish and having self-love.

His theory is not a selfless one. It's not you give up yourself to do something for your friend. You hold on to yourself. You like and care about yourself because you are a good person. Your self is really your rational part, the part of you that makes decisions. This is expressive of your character. And you value your friend in exactly the same way. And actually, you end up being somewhat intertwined with your friend.

Because you imagine you spend your days together, he says. You spend your days together with your friend. You live together in some sense. And as you do that, you're talking about the things that you care about, the things that are important in your life, the difficult and complex decisions that you're making in a daily basis. And because of that, sometimes your friend makes a decision and acts in a certain way

that reflects on you because you talked about those things you've made that decision together. So he says something like, in a way your friends' actions, are your actions, are part of your decision-making. You actually become better as well because your friends help you to deliberate.

So your friends are a way in which you develop your virtues. It's fascinating. For me, books 8 and 9 on friendship are some of the most beautiful parts of the ethics. I find them really rich study of the different kinds of friendship. You know, real friendship when it's based between two good people who care for each other's good for their own sake because they appreciate each other's goodness

and he contrasts that with friendships based on utility or pleasure which are not going to stand the test of time. One of the reasons it fascinates me is when we get to book 10 And all three of us have been touching on this. We've had this really rich, complex, nuanced account for nine books of what it's like to be an ethically wise and good person in a community. And using phronymus, using our practical reason. And then in book 10, chapter 7 and 8, he suddenly says, well, actually, Théaria, contemplative wisdom, is superior to practical wisdom

because contemplative wisdom is directed at superior objects. They are eternal and they're the kind of objects that God thinks about and that the theory or our capacity for contemplation is the divine bit in us

and that we should try to imitate God. And then you think... When he's using the word God, is he meaning gods? He sometimes talks of the gods and the Greek pantheon as does Plato, but as far as, in my opinion, both Plato and Aristotle believe in a single God. Aristotle says elsewhere that God is pure active thought thinking itself,

so not very like the Greek pantheon. And you think, where do friends come into this? Now, he does say, well, it's quite hard to contemplate by yourself for very long. You can do it better with friends. But it's still, you know, an interesting tension. A lot has been written about whether the two can be. combined. In Plato, the philosopher rulers do have to go back down into the cave, whether they like it or not, and rule it. Can you exercise Theoria, contemplative wisdom while you're running the state?

That's an interesting question. For me, it sets off a fascinating thread in the whole of Western thought about whether it's better to try to imitate God and inevitably fail, because of course we can't be God, or to be the best human that we can be and succeed at that. And Aristotle himself quotes some lines from the lyric poet Pinder, mortals should think mortal thoughts. It's hubristic, it's arrogant to try to be God, just stick to your human realm. And that tension, we see it right the way through.

You've got, is it Thomas Akemps, I think, in the Middle Ages, who writes the imitation of Christ, you've got that thread. And then didn't Alexander Pope write, Know then thyself, presume not God to scam the proper study of mankind is man? So you've got this, do you try to imitate God and transcend your normal human limits? Or do you stick within your human limits and be successful? Or a third option which interests me, is it actually part of our humanity to try to transcend our human limits?

And for me, that's one of the most absorbing questions in the ethics. Thank you. Roger. How important has his work been over the last two and a half thousand years? Just a short, an easy one. I'm not going on the end. I'm scared of one to ten. Probably about eight. It's been hugely important because he himself has been such an important thinking. You probably know that Dante calls him the master of those who know. And roughly speaking, if you did want to find something out or know something,

Before the scientific revolution, you went and looked it up in Aristotle. Now, in science, since that time, his works have been less significant, though it's worth remembering, I think this is true that in William Harvey's treatise on the circulation of blood, Aristotle gets more mentions than anybody else. But nevertheless, I mean, you won't find Aristotle on the reading list for most people studying science in university now. but the ethics are independent to some extent of his scientific views. So though, as it were, the philosophy is there in the background and explains why the ethics survived as well.

I mean, the whole story was there. I think the ethics can be looked at independently of the background philosophical theory, and that's why people have continued reading it till now. Sophia, which we're towards the end now, which of these ideas resonate most with contemporary philosophers? In the past 60 or so years, people in contemporary analytic philosophy and analytic ethics have been going back to Aristotle. There's been a movement towards contemporary virtue theory and virtue ethics.

And this was driven in part by the dissatisfaction with philosophical ethics during the last century, when it seemed to get further and further away from people's feelings, agency, character, moral psychology. and to centre more in abstract duties and rules, which sort of left character and personality out of the story. And people like Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foote, Alistair have been bringing back the virtues. In this movement, it has become Neo-Aristatelian. So some of Aristotle's actual views are watered down.

I mean, some of the more demanding parts of his theory. For example, that in order to be virtuous, you must have all of the virtues and practical wisdom. So you have to have that intellectual virtue as well as all of the character virtues in order to be happy and lead a good life. That seems so demanding that some neo-racitilian thinkers have focused more on the virtues, thinking about how we can make our lives go well by cultivating the virtues, by training our feelings, and we'll say things like, well, if you're trying to figure out the right thing to do, a good question might be, is it the virtuous thing to do? Or you might think, what would the virtuous person do in this particular situation?

Finally, Angie, do you think it, that's making it much more relevant than most people would think it would be his ideas? Do you think they are still relevant and worked through these at the moment? Oh, absolutely. I mean, things, it's such a rich text. There are so many important things we've not even had time to discuss yet. So his account of voluntary and involuntary action and moral responsibilities, it is hugely important in legal studies as well as in ethics, a very, very rich account of pleasure.

He has a distinction between justice and equity as far as I'm aware, and please do correct me, he's the first person we know of in the West to distinguish justice from equity like that. So there's just full of riches. A small addition to that would be that Aristotle's philosophy gives us a way to think about a young person growing up in his or her community and learning how to be good from other people and from following their example and from listening to their teaching. And so he gives us a way to think about moral development and to think about communities as incredibly important to moral development. I would go along with that.

I think moral education has pretty much dropped out of modern moral philosophy, and I think that's a great pity. It seems to be a serious, an important question, how people become good. And another question that I think has dropped out, and which dominated ancient philosophy, is what Henry Sidwick, the great Cambridge philosopher, called the profoundest problem of ethics,

which is how does morality or virtue relate to happiness? Aristotle's answer is they're the same. philosophers now usually don't have an answer because they don't think about it. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you, Angie Hobbes, Roger Crisp and Sophia Connell, and to our studio, engineer, Jackie Marjoram. Next week, the raids of the Barbara Coursairs and how right up to the 19th century they changed life

from the Mediterranean to the English Channel and beyond. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guest. I ask the question, which is the only question I'm going to ask, is what did we leave out that you would like to have been included? Is that with you, Roger? Well, we've mentioned pleasure, but I think there might be a bit more to say about it, because I find Aristotle's view on pleasure peculiar. I think he's trying to continue the Socratic project.

He's trying to show that virtue is the only thing that's worth having, the only thing that will make you happy. and vice in fact will make you unhappy. It's not just that it's not valuable. It's worth not having it. And by being vicious and doing vicious things, you are making your life worse. Now, one obvious thing that the vicious person might say is, oh, well, I get a lot of pleasure out of being a sadist

or being extremely powerful and getting people to do what I want them to do and so on. And on my reading of Aristotle, he thinks that vicious people don't really experience pleasure. It's not true pleasure. So for him, pleasantness is a bit like what philosophers have called a secondary quality. Right. So if somebody says a pillar box is green, you're going to say, no, it's not.

You're not able to detect that it's really red, and you're kind of blind to that aspect of it. I think he would also say to the vicious, person, you think you're experiencing pleasure when you're being horrible to other people. That's not pleasure. That's like somebody who is in a fever saying that the glass of lemonade they've been given is bitter. They're just getting it wrong. I mean, that he is picking up from Republic foot nine, isn't he? You know, that pleasures are objective. You may think you're feeling pleasure, but you've got it wrong. And that seems to us quite odd. We might say,

that's not a good source of pleasure, or you'd have a better, more flourishing life if you didn't get your pleasure from those sources. But yeah, no, fascinating. I just had a small thing to add about pleasure, which is I think that Aristotle is thinking in zoological ways about pleasure as well. So if you see an animal leading the kind of life that that animal characteristically leads, then pleasure will supervene on that. there'll be a proper pleasure that's natural. And he applies this to humans as well. So when we are reasoning correctly, when we're acting virtuously, that's the proper pleasure of being human.

And there's a lot more we can say about voluntary and involuntary actions, isn't there? Because it's such a subtle discussion. I really recommend people read it. So he says actions are involuntary if they're through force, an external force, or if they're done through ignorance. But then he makes a lot of very subtle distinctions between which kinds of ignorance we can be excused and which kind of ignorance are our fault

because we should have known that law because it was easy to find it out. That's something we should have known. And there's an interesting discussion of drunkenness and that the person who does something wrong when they're drunk, they may not be aware of what they're doing, but it's kind of doubly their fault because they chose to get drunk.

So it's... I think what's so remarkable about it is that we tend to read these discussions as if they were written yesterday, but they were written a very long time ago by somebody who doesn't have the conceptual distinctions we now have. He is inventing philosophy as he goes along. He's taking inspiration from the legal system of the time. But he's inventing legal theory. He's inventing the theory of justice.

You know, it's remarkable. And economic theory? Yeah. I mean, there's an extraordinary chapter on Monday. And, you know, what is it, what is anything worth? Well, it's worth what people want to pay for it. It's worth demand. But demand as represented by money.

So money is simply the represent. Money itself doesn't have any real value. Yeah, money is simply the representation of demand, and it's demand that's the common currency. When people can get that wrong, people who think that money itself has value and they are going to go wrong. I wanted to bring up the topic of weakness of. will. Aristotle is arguing against Socrates in some ways because Socrates says people never knowingly do wrong. So when you do something wrong, that's just a case of ignorance. And Aristotle thinks that looking around, you see a lot of people who make a judgment to do the right thing. They make the

right decision in some sense. And then they do the wrong thing. And this is just such a widespread phenomena that he thinks is really important that we try to get to grips with it. But it is quite difficult for him because if you remember when you make a decision you have that deliberative process at the end of the deliberative process you discover the right thing and he says you kind of immediately want to do that thing so what's stopping you why do you suddenly do the wrong thing he explains it in terms of a different set of wrong reasons coming in because your judgment has been clouded by emotions and irrational feelings um he has quite a sophisticated view that's still pretty important in the literature on weakness of will.

I think so. And he ends up in a way partly agreeing with Socrates, doesn't he? Yes, he does, yes. He takes issue with Socrates and the Protagoras, who says no one does wrong willingly, and he says, well, of course, that's nonsense. We see people doing wrong willingly all the time. But then he ends up and says,

well, actually these people, they're not actually going against their ultimate knowledge of first principles, what's happened is their desire has clouded their attention to their particular situation and they're not putting that knowledge into practice and he even admits, doesn't it,

I think I remember, he admits that actually deep down Socrates is right that full knowledge can't be overwritten that the problem is that we don't put that full knowledge into practice we're not attending to it. The other thing it makes us aware of

is how important it is that your feelings and your attitudes are correct. because you can have all made all the right decisions have all the right thoughts. But you're going to keep tripping up if you have the wrong attitudes and feelings. And so this sense of training your feelings, repeating the right kinds of actions until you feel the right things. Because he says that the person with weakness of will is curable. And he recommends that they just repeat the right things until they like them, which I think works to a certain extent. but once you reach a certain age,

it's very hard to backtrack and change your attitudes and feelings. And he'd never experience chocolate. Well, I think one thing to his credit is that he, unlike Socrates, he addresses the rather obvious fact that people very often, when they're doing something that they know is worse for themselves, they're being weak-willed, say,

I know this is worse for me, but I'm going to do it anyway. And he explains that by saying, well, that's just like somebody who's acting. don't really mean it. And again, this is... You know they don't really mean it. In some sense, they don't mean it. Because they haven't really come to terms of it.

And I mean, what you just said is that that's what most people, certainly over the last century or so have thought. I mean, it's just not a very good theory of weakness of will because we know true weakness of will happens. But take this example. I mean, take somebody who's advised by their GP to stop smoking. And they just go on doing it. I don't know it's worse for me in Zon.

and then the GP says, look, I'm going to take you to a ward in the local hospital where you'll see people suffering from the sorts of respiratory bronchial conditions and so on that I said you're going to get if you smoke. You can imagine that person after the visit saying, wow, now I really understand what this smoking is doing for me. I really know that it's worse for me in a way that I didn't before. I can still imagine that person saying, but I'm going to have a fag. Yeah. And Aristotle has an insight into that kind of psychology.

This just will happen all over the place. And this is a big issue that we need to deal with, that we need to take on board. Yeah. Pleasure would kick in that because somebody would say, I enjoy smoking so much and I'm going to keep doing it, even if you tell me it knocks a year or two off my life, I don't care, I'm having another cigarette.

Yeah. And Aristotle might say, well, you call that pleasure, but it's not worth having. I think Simon, our producer, is about to enter with an important announcement. Does anyone want to your coffee? Oh, tea would be lovely. Tea, tea, please. Herbal tea, peppermint or something like that?

Yes, pepment or something like that? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. It was about 2.30 in the morning. And every time in that moment of waking, I would see the man standing in the corner. It's here. Uncanny, season three. She was just walking, non-responsive, without talking, without blinking.

It seemed like something has just taken over. Terrifying real-life encounters with the supernatural. What I saw in that house frightens me and I wish I'd never seen it. Listen on BBC Sounds, if you dare.