Welcome back to the new Thinkery. I'm David Barr with me as always. It's my good friend Alex, pre you. How are you Alex?
Doing well David. How are you? Good. How was your Thanksgiving?
My Thanksgiving was good. Yeah. The losers don't overrecord this beforehand and it'll come out a little bit. We may not live to see Thanksgiving.
You know, my in-laws are here and they're going to cook all the food. So I'm going to go for a nice hike and then you have a bunch of turkey. You're having a super spreader Thanksgiving. Yeah.
This is true. You're fighting the law. The CDC recommended against that Alex. The law for the but not for me.
That's your motto Alex. It's for people. What are you doing? I'm doing fine Greg coming at you.
I'm celebrating Thanksgiving from the world. You would know of course for celebrating from the world headquarters. Nice people. I'm smoking a turkey.
I'm going to get up at like two in the morning. Craig, this is a family show. I'm just going to be I've never smoked one before. Apparently you got to dry it out real good to be able to like get it smoked.
Yeah. Yeah. I feel confidence. Yeah.
You'll be able to do that. Yeah. It's my first time doing it. We'll see you all.
Turn down. Today I'm excited. We were talking about book two of Aristotle's ethics. We've discussed Aristotle on courage before this episode will be a deep dive.
So I'm looking forward to we made depending on the feedback. Listeners give we may or may not do the whole of the ethics. Certainly it'd be nice to get to his lesser known works like the parts of animals, which we too have a shot. I've been reading that actually.
Yeah. Yeah. In preparation, you know, Turkey, Norman, I know if I should say the thing the lesson I learned so far now, which which lesson? Well, there's there's you.
I'll give the clean one. This is the recruiting. I know this all horned animals have multiple stomachs and yet bar doesn't have any horns. I don't think your stomach is a role.
That's great. But the other one is I don't know. I'll say the other one. No, you guys, that was so bad.
That was a horrible trick. No, that was true though. I know it's true, but I'd like to hear. I don't know why that's a sort of interesting thing.
The other one is that all animals have mouths and butts. There you go. Sometimes I'm the same. That's true.
Sometimes they're the same. Yeah. Anyway, that's a really great preview for the four-term campus on parts of animals. Yeah.
Trisha from that. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's both too bad.
Sorry. But before guys look, I know let's I wanted to bring something up. I don't know. You guys happen to read the reviews of our show ever.
The reviews of our show? Yeah. Yeah. Occasionally.
So I'd like to read a few of them. A few of our fans. Some of them. Where do one go to?
I don't even know. Like on iTunes? Yeah. If you want to review us, if you think any of these reviews is somehow incomplete or missing something, just go to iTunes and read this.
Oh, look. There we are. Yeah. We have 65 star ratings and one freestyle rating.
Yeah. So Miles Abel says, keep it going. Great podcast. Keep it going.
Yeah. That's the plan. Yeah. Another one says by renewed Agora with the title burst of interpretive wisdom says I'm really enjoying this particularly appreciative of their covering figures outside the typical canon.
Very good stuff. Wow. Thank you for your name. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. I'm willing to do that. Then I don't know what he does. I'm willing to do this.
I'm willing to do it. My name is David Barr. I'm a vocalist in like stars, that's three praise. Yeah, what's the problem?
You mean, what's the problem? I love this. But then he writes, you guys crack me up. I'm still not seeing any problem.
Cuck holds all. Now, kills nerd might be old because he remembers what I did to his girlfriend in high school. But I don't understand what warrants that kind of complain to the listeners at home. David, what what cuckold is they should know what it is.
So I take a look at the mirror, David. So I don't need to. I don't know. You know, the guy gave us a five star review.
Okay. Well, there you go. And he did say we're funny. That's nice.
Yeah, but he said we're each cuckolded. That's not nice. That's not nice. Yeah.
Maybe something in decent. You guys have nothing in decent to say. I have to carry the second. I'm just like, I gotta turn to the test.
This is really cool. Oh, right, right, right. Okay. You guys are taking away serious.
I understand. This is really disappointing. Guys, no good lawyer. No.
Yeah. So, okay. Ethics to what's going on. What's going on?
Sure. Why is this important? Great. Why are we doing ethics to and not as ethics three or more understandably ethics one?
Yeah. Sure. Maybe I can just briefly sort of outline what's going on in the ethics as a whole. You mentioned we already did part of book three actually on courage.
And we'll sort of have Alex give us a transition return to book one and then Alex can transition us to book two. So why are we doing the ethics? I mean, it's just a fun book. It's maybe one of the most important books in history of political philosophy.
I would say it's the best book ever written devoted to the question of human happiness. And book one is devoted to trying to lay out in my understanding, trying to lay out what our deepest hopes and desires are for our happiness. So what human beings long for fundamentally at their deepest. And the answer is happiness.
And so then says, well, in order to be happy, one needs to be virtuous. I mean, he sort of has some arguments to this effect. And then we get a long investigation of what virtue is. So we all want to be happy.
You must be virtuous to be happy. Although virtue is not sufficient for happiness. Apparently you also need stuff. But then we get a long investigation of what virtue is.
There is a digression there regarding what's sort of loosely speaking called moral responsibility. We return to a longer discussion of the moral virtues. Aristotle wraps up the moral virtues by transitioning to prunes, which is an intellectual virtue. He runs into some paradoxes or puzzles that are raised by the intellectual virtue of prunes.
Then he turns to one book, Investigation of the Intellectual Versues. We'll talk a little bit later on this episode about the difference between moral and intellectual virtues. When he's finished talking about intellectual virtues, he then says, now, of course, we should proceed to talk about friendship. The why is not immediately obvious to me.
But then we get a two book treatment of friendship or love. And then the book ends book 10 with what five chapters, I think, on pleasure and then five chapters on contemplation. So happiness, moral virtue, intellectual virtue, friendship, pleasure, contemplation. I think that's a really 10,000 foot level overview of the text.
I'll let Alex sort of tell us why we're focusing specifically on book two, which I think is probably the most famous part of the ethics and probably the part that if you took this in college, you probably would remember. It's not only the part that people most bring up when they're talking about Aristotle's moral philosophy. It's this idea of the mean, right, or the golden mean. It's very popular.
I think it's also the most comprehensive account of moral virtue that he gives after that. He goes into particular virtues as more of a religious Greg mentions after discussion of choice. So the ethics begins with a really sort of comprehensive statement. Every art and every inquiry, similarly, every action as well as choices, how to aim at some good.
This is the sort of framework for all activity and Aristotle argues ultimately in this opening that it's the political art that aims at the highest of all goods. And it's good as as Greg mentioned, happiness. The ethics is, I think, you could put it most simply a book that asks whether and if so, how we can live well and so be happy. More specifically, how can we live well and be happy together as far as we are political and rational animals.
And that leads you to things like the moral virtues, friendship and all the other stuff that Greg mentioned, including individuals sort of rational virtues having to do with contemplation or practical wisdom. Book one is a sort of preparatory discussion. It explores a number of opinions on this question about what the good life is or what happiness is. And these range from the common to the philosophic, from the vulgar, the aristocratic, all the way to Plato's understanding of the good.
I think one of the most important parts of this discussion, at least for our purposes, is Aristotle's discussion of chance. He argues pretty clearly and personally that human life is inherently unstable. And so external goods are unstable, things material things like stuff that Greg mentioned. They're important, but they're somehow secondary to a more primary consideration.
So, well, then I think even family, they're subject to the vicissitudes of chance, chance, and that means a good life is actually best assured. And also these material things do an internal good and this internal good is a kind of activity he calls virtue. In chapter 10, he puts it pretty clearly, even in the midst of these great pains and his fortunes, nobility shines through. Whenever someone bears a calmly under many greatness fortunes, not because of any insensitivity to pain, but because he is well born and great soul.
Now, I think this discussion for a longtime listeners of the podcast, I think this discussion is pretty fruitful when you contrast it with Monkey Valley. You might recall our discussion of the master of fortune in our episodes on the Prince. I find it rewarding when reading the ethics to consider how Aristotle's exposition of virtue could serve as a response to monkey values, a parent critique of his ethics as imaginary or ideal rather than real and effective. How well does Aristotle's account of virtue as a whole and not just the more virtues prepare us for fortune?
That's what he claims will happen and it's a good question always have in your mind. But to the main point, if happiness is had primarily through an internal quality virtue, then we have to think about the human interior, the soul. And so at the end of book one, chapter 13, Aristotle divides the soul into two parts, a rational part and an irrational part, and then divides the irrational part into a nutritive part and an impetitive part. The rational part involves thinking of all kinds and what that we mentioned.
It also relates to the impetitive or desiring part. The nutrient part is just a part that allows you to process food and stuff like that, uptake nutrition. Aristotle then begins book two by dividing virtue along these same lines into moral and intellectual virtue and turns first to more virtue, which is to say those virtues that involve the world of our desires and passions. And that's sort of how book one sets it up.
And so we want to keep all of these ideas in the background. How does virtue prepare us to deal with the vicissitudes of life, the change in circumstances? How is it going to give us a good life and happiness ultimately? And how the more virtues are going to relate to the intellectual virtues of virtue.
But here I think I'm getting into book two a bit and maybe a quicker day than once. I'm really quick before I have a question for both of you before we start in our next book to Greg gives the overview. I was wondering if either of you could discuss Aristotle's peculiar manner of writing. So this book is what we defined it as a treatise, but one hopes when they're reading, if you're used to reading a treatise let's say by law or something.
It's fairly straightforward. But Aristotle has all these circumlocutions. So he starts, he starts a very pregnant thread, drops it. That thread doesn't appear for books down the line.
And it's this kind of maze or ball of yarn with all of these threads sticking out. And this renders the ethics incredibly complex book. So I mean, for such a well-cited book, it seems that there's so much going on. I don't know really how well people know the book and what's going on at its core.
Does that make sense? Yeah, sure. I'll take a couple of stabs of this and then Alex will jump in with whatever he wants to say and add. So very simply, I would say, anyone who's reading this is the first time, I'm actually reading this with your professors on campus right now.
And they're struck by going through it slowly. What they're struck by above all is how conditional so many of Aristotle's claims are that they had previously just taken as sort of assertions or dogmatic principle. So if you're reading this first time, by the way, we're all using the Berlin Collins translation with University of Chicago Press. They're really good.
They do an excellent job of showing you how hesitant Aristotle can be. So many of his assertions are sort of couched in conditional statements. So Aristotle will say, well, if this is the case, then that is the case without ever having proven the first premise. He'll frequently say something seems to be the case or is held to be the case.
He'll also speak about things appearing to be the case. He treats people's opinions with a certain delicacy. So he'll say, well, you know, the opinion of the people like Alex is so-and-so. And so then he'll build an entire argument to go back and ask yourself, well, what if Alex's first principles weren't?
And then he starts with like real vulgar opinion too. So he's like, I was talking to Alex pre-use. He's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's like, not an awful piece.
He was a fat cow. Literally, he does this as a life of pleasure by saying it's a fat cow and book one. He comes back in book nine. Let me just two small examples before we move on to whatever we were going to do next.
I think in chapter four of book one, this is backtracking. Sorry. Aristotle mentions, he quotes a passage from Hesiod where I think he gives you some idea, perhaps, of his audience. This is at the end of chapter four, again quoting Hesiod.
He says, the one is altogether best who himself understands all things, but good in his turn too is he who obeys one who speaks well, but he who neither himself understands nor in listening to another takes this to heart. He is a useless man. So who is Aristotle's audience? Well, it's clear that it wouldn't be the one who understands things well on his own.
And it's probably not one who is not willing to listen. So maybe Aristotle's audience is the second best type of person, one who's actually willing to list other people. Let me have one more example and then we'll move on. Sorry.
Eric, since Alex read the very first sentence of the book, I'll just read it again. I'll read the first two sentences and then I'll read something else. So again, pay attention to the how hesitancy is. Aristotle says every art and every inquiry and similarly, every action as well as choice is held to aim at some good.
Hence, people have nobly declared that the good is that at which all things aim. Now, in my own opinion, aerosol has no billy. Sorry, I don't know. We'll have the cannon proper.
It's not this Georgia. There's Hoffman. I'll tell us. So my only point is that, look, he says everything is held to aim at some good.
Hence, it's been nobly stated that the good is that which all things aim. I mean, things can be nobly stated that aren't true. For example, David Barr is a nice man. That's a nobly state of sentence, but it might not be true.
So I'm just going to contrast that first sentence of chapter one of book one with the first sentence of chapter four. So chapter four, now let us pick up again and since all knowledge and every choice have some good as the object of their longing, just note that the term there has changed. It's not the thing that it's aiming at. Now it's the thing that it's longing for.
And whereas before, it was held to aim at it, and now he does say there is this longing for it. And so in other words, if you think through what the difference might be, it's possible that someone could long for something but not aim for the right thing. In other words, they're aimed to be off even if they are actually longing. Why is he writing like this Greg?
I mean, this is not such important. It's such important way. You say that, yeah, yeah, yeah, right, because you want to help people. But maybe he also states, I think in book one somewhere that this may not excuse him, that the subject matter, you have to write in a way that befits the subject matter.
So mathematics, you need to hit it has to be precision is the name of the game. But maybe an ethical matters. Different approaches is needed. Here I'll dispute a little something Alex said a moment ago and he said that aerosol says that this is the political or district.
And then we've went out that maybe it's an art or maybe it's a science. I think in the ethics aerosol just says, politicay. So which could be art. It could be science, not entirely sure either one.
But the point is to answer your question is that this is a political kind of inquiry as aerosol repeatedly stresses. And therefore, I think that for a little reason, he has to be careful as he's sort of saying things. I'm not so much focused on the safety aspect of the reason I think he does it pedagogically. The reason that he does this pedagogically is because he's trying to lead people to see things.
And I think that if you just state assertions boldly, people can accept prematurely or reject prematurely the opinions of aerosol is trying to lead you to. And so I think it's primarily to sort of educate the audience that aerosol writes in this very careful manner. That's why I think he's doing it. Yeah, I would add to that.
And this is I think going along with that pedagogical point that it's proceeding dialectically. Right. So when he treats an opinion and reaches some conclusions that show problems, that might be enough for him to discuss this opinion. He might decide to move on.
He might just raise a couple if then clauses for an opinion to kind of bring you to a more robust view of what this opinion might entail and then test that later on. Right. He's beginning from where he's reader might be likely to begin. He's pretty clear about who his audience is.
Right. He's beginning from where his reader might be beginning. And he might want to guide them along those necessary steps. So that means that a lot of this can be preparatory or preparatory.
Right. It's leading us along the way. And what looks like an assertion can often be based on a number of premises, which Aristotle does not share his audience. Right.
A reader might share them now until they have to be refined or replaced along along the way. This is just a sort of refrain. So I think reading a dialect in this came out. This will come out.
I think in this episode because I do think book two is extremely dialectical. But I do think also in our courage episode, we were sort of reading it that way. So we have this kind of progress made in the arc and kind of deep into awareness of the phenomenon under consideration by virtue of these different paths he takes. In the topics by ourselves, he says the reasons that one would proceed dialectically and they are largely pedagogical.
And he says sort of gymnastical, which I think he just means it's sort of intellectual training towards where. And I'll mention that I also would say the way that he's proceeding. This is sort of a curious thing. I think that if you're not willing to go with him and sort of investigate these things further, he has sort of stopping off points that are healthy political opinions.
And so he's, I think he's trying to proceed carefully so that he doesn't disturb people's decent opinions when they can't sort of make further progress. I mean, I didn't state that very clearly, but I don't. I think he's being somewhat careful with his audience. Maybe that's just the best way to say his audience are for the gentle man.
Yeah. I think Prince will that's right. Which David does not mean soft, soft man. There's not gentle like when you touch their like, punchy or something like that.
The listeners are listening to the home, Alex, which is wiggling his fingers, all of them in David Bar's direction. I have eyes closed so I can imagine it more vividly. One thing I, maybe to just build on this and this is going to be a little bit off script, but about the dialectal approach of book two, he starts off very emphatically pushing for moral or ethical virtue to be a kind of habit. Right.
And he slowly, I think over the course of the chapter comes to see the problems with establishing more virtue as a habit so that what starts off is a very kind of clear. This is what it is right. We know it ethical. He says, right comes from the word for habit ethos.
Right. And that's what it means. It has to do with getting the right habits. And this is something you develop over time and you just do what's just and you'll become jobs right.
He raises a couple of questions to dismiss them. But by the end, it turns out it seems like you're always kind of dancing around the virtue. You're never quite sure if you hit it, even if you're quite successful and it gets, you get a sense that this is him slowly bringing you to a view of morality and then subtly, I think, suggesting that this might be harder than it looks that might be keeping, I think, with Greg's claim that. Oh, look, he's pushing you to think, oh, this is how I ought to act, try to avoid doing, you know, go too far this way or too far there.
I'm getting ahead of ourselves a bit, but try to aim for this sort of this perfect mean. And that's the virtue. Oh, that sounds really good. When you start getting into the psychology and even the epistemology, it gets very, very, I think difficult to say that this sort of thing is at all fully possible or wholly realizable.
But I mean, I'm getting too far ahead of us, but I think that's a kind of dialectical path he takes us down in Book Two. Maybe what we'll do is just I'll try and lay out what I think he means by virtue in a sort of simplistic way. And you guys should jump in with additions and corrections and all that. But because Book Two is really about virtue.
And what does this mean? What listeners, I imagine most of our listeners have some sort of familiarity with ourselves. Maybe they don't need to explain to them, but for people who are new to it. Oh, they need it, Greg.
I mean, before you start, one thing we didn't discuss is how many philosophers in their own right have, I just mentioned in the Pantheon, how many philosophers have written commentaries on the ethics. Oh, the quinus, the Arabic philosophers, my monadies, did Heidegger write on the ethics? It's a big one, it's for a bad man. People have, I mean, like people in the Pantheon write commentaries on this book because it's so difficult, but also because of this discussion of virtue, what you're about to lay out, I'm sure better than Aquinas or Heidegger could, Greg.
It's so fertile. So yeah. What's interesting in what I was trying to allude to before, though, is I think that for non-specialists out there, there's a lot in this book that a Heidegger or a Kant or an Aquinas or an Aquinas or an Aquinas or an Aquinas or an Aquinas or an Aquinas or an Aquinas or an Aquinas or an Aquinas or an Aquinas or an Aquinas. Or an Aquinas or an Al-Expreu would take away from it.
It's a lot of burden. And there's also something that... You read another excellent commentary. She did write an excellent commentary on it.
But I mean, there's also stuff in here for anybody. I'm not Winston Churchill, who's of course still not just anybody, but there's some story that maybe it's apocryphal, but that someone gave him a copy of this. He read over the night the next day and said, yeah, it's everything I agree with. And so, yeah, that's great.
The beauty of this book, the beauty of this book for me is that it can occupy the minds of the most serious intellectual people who've ever lived. And it also has really practical sort of takeaways for a first time reader with no philosophic expertise whatsoever. Absolutely. Absolutely.
And this is the chapter where it kicks off. This is the book where it kicks off. Yeah, book two. No question.
Sorry, the book. Right. That's the same. It's a model.
So what is the character? Give the people what they want. The wisdom. The wisdom.
I don't want to under the beard. A lot of gray hair. So it was virtue. What is virtue?
One way. One way. One way. Look, listen, listen.
Listen, listen. I realize that most of you are here for my philosophic exegesis and not for my two teenage hoodlum friends trying to bring you. You see? There you go.
Right there. Yeah. Yeah. Fine.
Okay. Alright. Virtue. Let's try this for the fifth time.
I think Aristotle means by virtue simply, we might just say excellence. What is the excellence of a thing? What is human excellence? Virtue sounds kind of old fashioned and stuffy.
Not to us because we've been corrupted, but I think it sounds kind of British to ordinary folks. And so we're really ourselves. We're talking about things having excellence. So a knife has a virtue, but that sounds strange, right?
But we would say we quickly recognize what an excellent knife is. Right? If you have a dull knife or a knife. It would be good for a seven.
But if it were broken or dull, it wouldn't be good for its function. So it would not be an excellent knife. Eyes are excellent. So all three members of the new thinkery have deficient degraded to decrepit eyeballs.
And so we all wear corrective lenses. So our eyes are not excellent. Well, Alex might be excellent to look at, but they're not excellent for looking out into the world. Alex has an excellent bald head.
He does have an excellent bald head. Eyes. I've got green eyes. They're pretty.
You do have excellent eyes, but not excellent for seeing. So function. So by and large, especially in book one, aerosol had to find a thing's excellence by how well it does its job. So if the eyes job is to see, then all three of us actually have bad eyes.
If the object of hair is to protect the head, then for Alex's hair has failed miserably. Right? Knives have functions. Pen have functions.
Houses have functions. Political communities have functions. And so the excellence of a thing is what its function does do its function well. So the more complicated and more controversial, I suppose, especially these days would be, well, what is human excellence?
And the reason I suppose it's controversial is because we would say, well, therefore, if you're not doing X, Y, or Z, you're not an excellent human being. So book one has sort of laid out for us the case that to achieve human happiness, we need to have X, we need to be excellent. We need to be virtuous. And what does that mean?
Well, here in book two, he'd be against the layout of the case that it means principally, you have to be excellent morally. You have to be morally excellent. But let me add one little thing. The first question we have to ask is what is the human beings function?
Right? What is the human capacities or something like that? You know, we think of thinking, right? And therefore there's intellectual virtues and we have passions like anger and fear, right?
And that leads to the more. Just want to include that. No, good point. The work argument that he makes in book one is relatively famous actually.
It's called the air gone argument for folks who went to Google at home. You're still different played. Everything else. Naturally.
You're going to be also the mean teaching he stole from Plato. All of this. Still aren't from Plato. Should have killed Aristotle.
You know what I'm saying guys? What? I don't know where to come from here. So yeah, he definitely, I mean, a lot of this was taken from Plato.
I mean, he was his teacher after all. Wait, Alex, if I understand you, are you saying Aristotle and Plato have the same teaching just cloaked in different garb? Well, I mean, the mean stuff is taken from the statesman, right? He doesn't cite Plato.
He disses Plato in book one apparently, right? He's really harsh on them and then jacks every other argument. And he's actually harsh on the plate and it's not played out. Yeah, that's what I mean.
It seems like it, but he's not. So again, virtue, I think for Aristotle means something like excellence. Now, I suppose, and Alex already alluded to this moment ago, how do we acquire excellence? That seems to be one of the final questions here as well.
By the way, we still don't know, I think it probably should address what is human excellence. We don't know. One small point before we transition to habituation is that aerosol is emphatic that virtue has to do to a large degree with pleasure and pain. I don't know what we want to do with that.
But Alex, how do we go about, how does habituation fit into this question of virtue? Yeah, so he's concerned with how we acquire it. And he's pretty clear to say that the reason we're concerned with that is because we want to live well, right? So there's a kind of practical objective to this work.
It's not merely contemplative. In fact, he has a few somewhat contemptuous statements about contemplation. So we don't know what virtue is. I think this is again a sign that the word is dialectical.
We know that there's this thing called virtue that has to do something with the soul. And we're going to try to figure out what that is. And hopefully it'll help us live well. And so he has to start with, I think the most obviously accepted kind of virtue, which is kind of more virtue, right?
And yeah, great. You want to jump in here? Just one small point. So as we move into book two where he starts, so even just talking about human excellence.
And now we're going to talk about moral excellence. He's going to focus on moral virtue or moral excellence in book two. But that requires, we still don't know what virtue is. But it requires aerosol to make a split in the human soul between the rational and the non-rational things.
Right? So there's this bifurcation upon which the account of moral virtue seems to depend. And by the way, just in common parlance, this is common sense. Like I have my desires and I have my thinking.
And I really want to donut, but my thinking says don't eat the donut. So there's this bifurcation that I think most of us common sensibly recognize. And that bifurcation he makes use of in order to begin to talk about moral virtues. Yeah.
And this ends up being a bit of a difficulty in our form. So he argues, I think largely linguistically, right? He's concerned with ethics or ethical virtue, right? He's calling this kind of morality.
He says, well, more virtue got its name. This is in that first chapter book two by a slight alteration of the term habit, ethos. Right? So it's a linguistic marker that's really going to incline us to think about habit.
Right? Now, the basic idea here is that, yeah, we get it human beings are habituated. And habituation is a kind of second nature. Right?
You do something repeatedly and it becomes kind of ingrained muscle memory and all that. And you just start getting the same thing with psychology. It becomes a kind of habituated thing. He makes this joke, right?
That this is how we differ from natural things. He says, for example, a stone because it is born downward by nature could not be habituated to be born upward, not even if someone habituates it by throwing it upward 10,000 times. It's kind of funny. It means stones are stupid, but also people who try to habituate stones are pretty damn stupid.
But I mean, he's trying to argue that this is not natural. So the main thing he's trying to make is a kind of dissection between nature and convention, though not really convention in the sense of law or something like that. Nature and habit, right? And he wants to separate the two.
And I think one of the problems we want to keep our eye out for as we read is whether those two can actually be kept separate altogether. Greg, I just want to point. So it's not simply the virtues aren't simply natural. As far as it takes some kind of a way to acquire them through teaching or habituation or learning or training.
And so humans can change. What am I trying to say here? The stone example seems like they're only two alternatives. Like it can or cannot go.
Whereas humans seem to be, you can have the virtues, you cannot have the virtues or you can be sort of in between. So the acquisition of the virtues seems to be between natural and non-natural. If that makes some sense. I don't know.
Yeah. Okay. Can I also, if you can't drain a rock to not fall down, but you can train a David bar to stop eating a dozen donuts a day. See, I want to push back on that, Greg.
This is actually, this has to do with the point I was about to make. That I actually don't know if I'll just say this is how I feel. You read this book and it's great. Great.
I'm a little overweight. I sleep in and I have other bad habits. I'll read the ethics and figure out what I need to do. Except at the end of chapter one, he says it makes no small difference then whether one is habituated in this or that way, straight from childhood.
But a very great difference or rather the whole difference. The point I wanted to make is this whole discussion of habituation. To me, it takes place under a dark cloud. It's almost like after you've hit a certain age, it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, to write your ship.
I know that people, and the reason I was thinking of watching last night, some murder show, and my wife calls it murder porn. You know one of these date blind things? And I know exactly what Keith Morrison and guys like, I'm a different man. I've changed and blah, blah, blah, in these conversion stories.
In this book, Aristotle hints but he doesn't underscore just how difficult I think. This is. Yeah, and I think that's why that was long winded. That line is really helpful because it doesn't underscore the fact that, and then he goes in chapter two, right?
If you think about that, right? It makes the whole difference if since childhood, I don't know many children reading Aristotle's. You're kind of reading this and your life is already a little wonky as David pointed out. It's not going to be easy.
And I says, yeah, first off, I think that's exactly right. And when I teach this, that's one of the lines that I circle back to and show them how problematic this entire account of things is. So I actually very much agree. I wonder if part of this book isn't aimed at the gentleman class who have children of their own.
And so the idea here is this is how we need to educate the young, if that makes sense. So if it's not what I would agree, but he also says a chapter two, right? The present subject is taken up not for the sake of contemplation as are others, for we are conducting an examination not so that we may know what virtue is, but so that we may become good, right? So I think you're 100% right.
This would be a good maybe instruction manual on how to educate your children to be sort of gentleman. But I do think there's still a kind of investment that we have or maybe we want an account of how we have come to be good. But I think to go back to the original point, there is this distinction between nature and habit, right? That he's making.
But I think by the time you get to the end of the book, it seems like they're not entirely separable, right? We have our kind of built in inclinations. And what's incumbent upon us above all is to understand them if we're going to try to develop these habits. But even that turns out it's going to be very, very difficult to do.
Should we move on to the next subject or get that lesson? No, I think it's really important. I think we should come back to this objection that David raised at the end after we've, because I don't know if if listeners aren't familiar with book two, there's some parts that they're going to be missing. So in other words, aerosol sort of throws this problem out, but then sort of pushes it aside and all we need to know about more virtues.
And I think it sort of seeps back in toward the end. But so I think it'd be helpful if we sort of, what does this situation mean? What does it look like? So let me let's try and put them.
Well, let's try and put the positive spin on it. And then and then come back and answer your objection because I completely agree that that objection is problematic. So, but so, you know, most of us, we had to have been raised right to create aerosol to actually be morally virtuous. So if you're going to be moderate, that takes a certain education when you're a child, which is completely outside of your control.
But as an adult, if you know that you're moderate with, let's say, so moderation is one of the more virtues. It's the second one, I believe that he lists. It's a virtue with respect to bodily pleasures, narrowly speaking. So food, drink, and the things of Aphrodite as aerosol says.
And so if as an adult, you haven't been raised right, but you sort of become aware that you would like to change things, let's say to you over indulgent drinking. Well, the mean for aerosol would be, you know, a moderate amount of drinking, but perhaps for every day, exactly. So for every, so for every virtue for aerosol, there is a an excess and a deficiency. So for moderation, there is an excessive moderation and a deficiency.
So one could be immoderets, meaning one's just eats drinks and does the other thing as much as one wants, or one could be completely ascetic and abstentious and abstain from them entirely. Aerosol thinks both the person who abstains entirely and the person who overindulges are making moral mistakes and that the morally virtuous thing is to sort of enjoy these things in modern mouth. Now, he will say, if you drink too much, you should practice the opposite vice. You should abstain because that will bring you back to the middle.
So there is some practical advice for adults. You should try to be funny and play company according to aerosol, right? You should be witty. But some people can be borish.
They have no sense of humor. And some people like, I'll admit myself can be buffoonish. Like you make too many jokes in public. And so if I were trying to be virtuous with respect to this social virtue of whitiness, I should practice keeping my dang mouth shut when I go to parties and maybe that will bring me back to the middle.
So very quickly, sorry to Alex needs to jump in. David needs to say, but every virtue aerosol lists 11 of them actually in book two or actually that might be 13 in book two, but then he drops them later. There are a thing to go ahead. I think also the mean applies also in speaking, right?
One should not speak for 20, 30 minutes or something like that, right? I have a question for you guys. Which I just want to add one. Yeah, go ahead.
Okay. What Greg said is absolutely true on the basis of the last chapter of the book two in the early chapters where he's talking about habit. It's very different. I think it's contradictory.
He says, if you want to be just do just things, if you want to be moderate, do moderate things by the end, it's like, well, if you're a little bit of steamy us, push yourself to drink a little bit more, right? Or if you're a little bit cowardly, push yourself to fight a little longer, right? And so, and that I think is crucial because that implies that your nature might tend you to one or the other vice. So it doesn't seem like nature and habit are entirely distinguished by the, the end of that account.
And this is, I think also just to add another line to this chapter four, he actually treats this question. Someone might be perplexed as to what we mean when we say that to become just people must do just things. Do you have to be just to do just things? He's kind of contemptuous of this objection.
He says, oh, this is just a logical, like tricky point. It turns out to be, I think, really important in some form at least. Yeah. Obviously, if you can do just things, you'll become just the problem is how do you start doing just things if you're always a little bit off?
How do you start doing moderate things if you're always eating? You know, I've had two cupcakes today and a day is still young. How do I abstain to the right amount of cupcakes? Don't ask me, Charlie.
I have a question for you guys, unless you wanted to say something further about the mean. Sometimes we hear it's the middle between two extremes, but that's wrong. Alex had a preshow rant about meltdown as he was literally stuffing up cupcake and his mouth. He was like, yeah, why is that wrong?
I think it's kind of important because this is a kind of place saying for philosophy and struggle is written speech. So I think the important thing to grasp is that there's two different kinds of measures, a kind of arithmetical measure and a measure of the mean. He talks about this with food, right? What's the program?
I always teach this text. I like to talk about Michael Phelps when he was in the Olympics. I talked about it. Was it like 13,000?
Yeah. He's eating like whole pizzas. And it's like he was eating like he's one and a half bars or something like that. So, but it depends.
It's relative to using individual, but it's still on that sliding scale of less to more. Obviously from the perspective of the mean, it looks like there's two extremes. But what he's trying to do is show you that the arithmetical measure more and less changes relative to your circumstances and what's necessary, right? So I just think that's an important distinction to keep in mind.
Yeah. And I have a quick question Greg, unless you wanted to say something. Nope. But one thing I can't figure out is why does he order the virtues presented in that order?
You got 11 of them. It's a good salary. No, this is an important question. I mean, it's a six to a ratio.
Greg likes the middle ones. Ambition. But what's the issue? I mean, I don't know how much insight base I want to get to with these guys, but he gives a list of really inside.
He gives 12 actually in the first list in book two chapter seven. Yeah. So why the ordering? Do you have any of you guys in the theory?
I can go. So yeah, maybe I can quickly just go through what they are. So the first version of courage and then moderation and then liberality or generosity, magnificence, greatness or magnanimity, if you will, then there's one that's not named, it has something to do with ambition. Another one that's not named has to do with being gentle.
Another one that's not named has to do with being friendly. Another that's not named that has to do with being truthful or honest. With and then shame and then righteous indignation. He also mentions justice briefly.
So the first one's courage, by the way, all of the virtues as I mentioned a little bit ago seem to have to do with pain and pleasure above all. And so the and Alex mentioned that by nature, we seem to be inclined towards some and away from others. And I think that insofar as humans tend by nature to be toward pleasure, you can see where some of these virtues make sense. So for example, the first more virtue is courage and it has to do with pain with respect to the body.
And so the most natural human advice with respect to courage would be cowardice. So more humans, I think, would move away from courage toward the deficiency than to the excess, which is a kind of boldness. So for everyone of those virtues, I just mentioned, there's an excess and a deficiency. So for moderation, there's the excess and deficiency in moderation and asceticism or something like that.
And that's pleasure with respect to the body. So we move from pain with respect to the body to pleasure with respect to the body to wealth. So we're moving away from you. How close it is to your core.
And then ambition, which seems to step up or step back, I'm not sure. And then we move to a series of virtues related to how you behave in social situations. It's very strange. And then at the end, we get these two virtues, shame and righteous indignation, that only Iran and book five get replaced by justice.
And he says sort of emphatically that shame is no virtue for an adult human being and righteous indignation kind of just falls by the wayside. I don't really know. I suspect the attack was courage first because it's the most problematic of the virtues. That's just a guess.
But I don't really, I've tried many times to make sense of the movement. And I don't know. So maybe the most obvious virtue as a virtue, right? And so far as the more.
And you can see it. It's very probable. It's very praiseworthy because it's not larger sacrifice. Yeah, going on.
Well, then I think it's kind of lurking in the background is he starts with the distinction between intellectual and moral virtue, but then as a kind of moral virtue is highly mathematical, right? It's highly logical, right? You have a kind of measure that's relative to you. And I think that's an important detail.
At one point, he goes so far as to say that the mean is such as the prudent individual defines it, right? The frawny moths. This is related to the Greek word for practical wisdom, frawnysis, right? So there's this sense that as he separated them out, there's kind of lurking in the world that's a precise mean.
That's a matter of practical discernment or intelligence, right? And so are they ultimately entirely separable, especially if it comes down, as Greg mentioned, right, to understanding what your inclination is to on one or the other side of the mean, right? If you're part of the excess of the deficiency. And that seems like a kind of self-knowledge.
And this is a kind of a contemplative aspect that's necessary to this virtue. So again, I think this is part of the dialectical motion. So on its surface, this just seems like good advice, as Greg says, right? This is, yeah, of course, it's a mean.
But suddenly he's pointing out that from a firm of a self-knowledge, right? This is, yeah, of course, it's a mean. But suddenly he's pointing out that from a philosophical perspective, there might be some real problems with how he's setting up. It might be that you can't have more virtue without intellectual virtue.
It might be that having intellectual virtue shows you that you can't have more virtue, right? There can be all these different questions that arise that we have to take seriously, not just if we're philosophers or concerned with arguments, but if we want to live well. Yeah, I also think it's interesting to point out that not everybody agrees on this list. So famously, Greg can talk about this more since he has a stronger background than for obvious reasons than either Alex or myself.
The Christian tradition, greatness of soul drops out prominently as a virtue. It's just no longer there. I was just looking, actually, honestly, I was just looking here for a start at Aquinas' commentary and the other purpose on precise of that question. I didn't find it satisfactory.
Is that right? That was what I remembered. That's what my very, yeah, very pious, because humility is of course a Christian virtue. That's right.
And they also add, of course, from Paul's letter to the Corinthians, they had the three Christian virtues, fake, open, love. Yeah. I think a place of magnitude could go on. They think of humility, but they also think of the great virtue of building sheds for your pagan friend, right?
Yeah. Yeah. They slish the ham. That's right, Alex.
They slipped that one in there. Rationally, I don't know how they defend it, but you've some of them. Another detail, and this is in my own insight. I owe this to Michael Davis.