Welcome back to the new thinkery. My name is David Barr with me as always is my good friend Alex Prio. How are you Alex? I'm doing well.
Feeling peachy. How are you doing? I'm doing well too. And our good friend Greg McBrayer.
How are you Greg? Actually, I'm quite under the weather, but I'm super excited for the show. Very glad to be here with Mary Nichols. It's such an honor to have her on the show.
How are you David? I'm doing well and doing well. And thanks for joining us Mary. My pleasure.
Yeah. So people don't know we've been trying to get Mary on the show for a long time. But she said, you know, I've dealt with Greg enough. The translating project was just a beast.
The guy's Greek was in shambles. I can't bear it to be. We sure heard that we'll keep Greg, you know, the rain is short on Greg. Well, I appreciate that.
But I have to say, he did a great job. It was a great pleasure working with him. And I think I don't know that either of our Greeks better than the other. We had back and forth conversations on different points and it was a learning experience for me.
And Alex is referring to the Ethedemis from Focus Publishing that they let Mary co-translated with Greg, but also an interpretive essay you contributed. So really, most of our listeners know who you are. You are one of the most requested guests we've ever had Mary. So this is really a number of people.
Yes. So Mary P. Nichols is professor emerita at the local silence at Baylor University where she taught from 2004 to 2018. As a department chair, she facilitated the establishment of the department's first PhD in political science in the spring of 2005.
So we can call Mary Nichols is officially a founder, which is really a nice kind of title just like Alex is a founder too at the University of Austin when he starts. But she's here today to discuss her most recent book from Notre Dane Press, Aristotle's Discovery of the Human, Piety and Politics and the Nicomachean Ethics. So welcome, Mary. Thank you.
I'll ask the first question. Just off the based off the title, Aristotle's Scary of the Human and Piety and Politics and the Steve of the Time, Aristotle does not include it in his long list of virtues. I mean, if the only, for example, you all know Plato's Republic well, well, Piety is not one of the four virtues there either. But there's certain purposes that serves.
And so there are four virtues to put into the city, which we will not go into why, but Aristotle doesn't have any limitations, such as might explain Socrates's four virtues in the Republic. And yes, so many virtues, people don't even know how many they are. They usually say 11 or 12. I looked at the Eudemian Ethics the other day, and he himself lists them with the vices, those two sets of vices on one side, a list of virtues, he lists 14 there.
So with Aristotle, the virtues just proliferate. And this to me is all the more striking that he doesn't have. Piety is one among the virtues. I don't think he does not want to consider it as one virtue among others.
It is not a virtue, I believe, but it is something that explains all of the virtues. It explains his stance toward the virtues. Let me go back and start with something on the one hand, what I'm saying seems rather unusual and goes against the grain of all interpretations for the reason you mentioned. But it's also the case that I think, in a way, I am saying something about Aristotle that everyone already knows.
I'm just elaborating and pulling out some of the implications of it. You all know how he says in the politics, when he is explaining how human beings are political by nature, and that the city is natural. And he says that if there is, if anyone is without a city or could live without a city, he would be either a beast or a god. So I'm taking what Aristotle is saying, I am assuming that he does mean it when he says human beings are political by nature.
However complicated it might be to explain that. But he means that we are not beast or gods or something in between beast or god. And that it is by being sure we don't fall below the human and by being careful not to rise too high above it, which is a kind of presumption, are hubris, we will maintain our human status and be open to all of the goods that are available to human beings who live in that in between space between beasts and god. And so throughout the ethics, he has different ways of warning us about those two dangers for human life.
But falling below the human, trying to go too far above it, which I think you would say leads to tragic consequences, disasters for political life. And also we miss out on what is possible for human beings and what is good for human beings. Follow up, I know you want me to say more about that controversial statement. But please go ahead.
I guess I'm as this is the right place to transition. But even the cover I was trying to find the page real quick of the graces here. I thought that was the one interesting part of your book. Maybe you could discuss that how, because that's where I thought maybe okay, I see how I kind of undergirded all the way that these monuments sort of decorate the city and are constant reminders and are impediments in some way.
Can you speak more about that? I'll see if I can find the page. Well, the raises are those three divinities, daughters of Zeus, and they represent happy things, good cheer, celebration in various ways. They don't, there's not much about them in Greek literature apart from Aristotle.
It's not even clear that there were any shrines to the raises that Aristotle refers to. But when he's talking about justice, a very complex discussion, but he finally gets to something that he calls reciprocal justice. It seems to occur in what we might call civil society, human beings are executing harm for harm, returning harmful harm. That's one way he talks about reciprocity.
And they give, they also reciprocate good for good. He of course refers the second, because it is a more civilised life not to reciprocate good for good rather than harmful harm. And he uses the mod, he says, that's why people put up shrines to the graces on the roadway to remind them to return good for good. It's not just an automatic thing that we do naturally.
We need reminders and these divinities serve as reminders. Even as a second aspect to what the graces remind us, he says, they also remind us to initiate good deeds, not just to act in return. So he uses these, he says they are up, they're put in the roadway. Well, that's how it's usually translated, some say in a public space, someplace they're noticed.
What the Greek is, is a word that looks like impediment. It's in the way of our feet and put on impediment. And so it's like there's somewhere where we're walking along. I think he's using his metaphorically.
I don't think that there were actually shrines to the graces and happens. No one else, I don't think there's any anyone who tells us about them except Aristotle says that they're there. He doesn't say an happens. He just says people put them up.
It's actually the passive voice. They are put up. The shrines are put up by whom? Where?
But he seems to be making something of this, because he says that reciprocal justice, and especially the example of good for good, is what holds the city together. A kind of amazing statement, you might think the laws are what holds the city together. And indeed, this is in the context of a five where he defines justice as a complete virtue because it is in the universal sense, the lawful and commands all the virtues and forbids all the vices. But it is reciprocal justice, not the lawful or the laws that hold the city together.
Well, what guarantees that if you can't just rely on the laws for it, and it is Aristotle appealing to these particular divinities? He's he had mentioned some, Homer mentions them, but does not say much about them. And I have one kind of, I'll say, live and comment in my book when I talk about them. And I say it looks like Aristotle knew more about the braces than he said, who is his source for them.
Obviously, he is using this to remind his book, you could say, is a shrine to the graces to remind us both to return good for good and to initiate good deeds, and that will hold a political community together. Do you want to ask a question, Alex? Yes, I do. So you make, so you give this reading of the ethics as a whole that shows the way in which piety or some form of piety undergirds the various virtues.
And you're introducing a really helpful kind of succinct formulation, you say, as on page six for those who have it, I attempt to show, not me you, you tend to show that divine knowing, as well as beneficence is a model for politics, while divine beneficence, as well as knowing is a model for philosophy. So one question I had is, does the view of piety changed based on where we're looking in the virtues or the type of human being we're looking? And I was wondering if you could say something about, because this formulation is very powerful and interesting, but also it requires a little bit of unpacking, of course, because it's so succinct. So does that make sense as a question?
I think so. I think I was commenting on a scholar or two, and it's a plausible position that says, the city's God is a benefactor. There's a kind of divine beneficence that the city imagines that it needs and that it has, whereas the philosopher's God is a knowing God, both in a way are models and they're used as models for the philosopher, but the divine is kind of this unknowing, whereas for the city, the divine is understood as to be doing good deeds are kind of benefaction. What I'm trying to say in the book, in many ways, and for many passages, is that in both cases, there's something of the other.
I'm not assimilating everything to everything are the philosophy, but to the statesmen, they are different, but they're not radically different. And I think that the statesmen might be more associated with beneficence. He gives laws, he tries to make the citizens better. There are many formulations that Aristotle has of what the statesmen or the political man does.
He is concerned with the common good. He's prudent. He tries to understand the good for himself and for others and to bring it about. So you can associate a statesman with a kind of, as a benefactor, and therefore, a beneficent good God would be a model for him if he had a divine model.
I'm just getting that this is in the literature on Aristotle, whereas for the philosopher, the God, the mind knowing itself, knowledge of all things, that would be a model for the philosopher. I'm trying to say what I'm trying to do is bring those things together in a way so that the statesman also has to know certain things. He has to investigate what the human good is for himself and for others and for the city. And that is, there could be tensions between those things.
That is investigating quite a bit. And Aristotle says that they just before turning to the core or the meat of the ethics at the end of book one, Aristotle brings up the statesman as if the work were addressed to the statesman, which it is, although to more than just the statesman, and he says the statesman must know the soul. If he's going to do his work, his task in the city, which is to make human beings good. And so knowledge, and he uses the word knowing that comes in for the statesman.
So with regard on the other side, with regard to the philosopher, I think if there's a better than issue here, but I think one of my arguments is that for Aristotle, Aristotle presents himself in the ethics as a philosopher and as someone philosophizing about human affairs. And that also includes not only knowing the human soul, it also is a kind of benefit, a good deed for the city in his telling us what he knows about human affairs and opening his reader up to philosophizing about human affairs, including the statesman. So I don't see a radical dichotomy between but never sense and knowledge as ways of understanding the divine. And I see both of those characteristics we typically attribute to the divine coming into play in, I would say, in all human beings.
Okay, one more thing on Alex's question is a different at different times. Everything differs at different times in the in the ethics and for Aristotle, but it's always within the boundaries between beast and God, regardless of political manner statesman or philosopher. So that doesn't differ with the manifestations, the manifestations and the different virtues, the tendency in one direction are the other, the passions that are involved in the individual virtues. Everything differs in different manifestations, but that boundary, the human is that in between state, that doesn't change.
But just to add one thing to that list, you would say also the education is that lead to that, by the different, right, the education of a noble citizen or a gentleman, if you will, right, would differ from the education. Because you speak at some points about religion, but then at some points about a kind of awareness of perplexities and right, and Aristotle seems concerned primarily with which would you say, I mean, I know this is among the questions we were considering talking about, so maybe we could have it there. But is this primarily for gentlemen or for philosophers, because it seems to kind of right hedge on both? Well, I think there's room for everyone in the ethics.
Except for those who need punishment, you say at one point, right? Well, he allows punishment to, I mean, like with justice, he has the justice in the universal sense and the law and he divides that into two forms of particular justice, one's distributive justice among his corrective justice. He has not only the basis in the ethics and in the city, he also mentions the punitive God, Radimanthes, one of the sons of Zeus, who judges, one of the three who judges the souls in the afterlife. He speaks of them and then he moves quickly on to the races.
So there is a, there is still punishment, there is still force involved in the city, but he is trying to bring out the most elevated aspects of the city, not that he thinks that they will always be in force or that we will always be achieving them, but he is giving us something to which we can aspire. Now, who is he writing for? I mean, he is addressing, I mean, he writes, but I think he writes for everyone. Now, he may not be so, but he may be addressing people in different ways.
He starts with where people are at, so to speak. I mean, he will say certain things, he will, if he's addressing a great soul human being, people say other things if he's talking about courage, he will say certain things if he is addressing the elderly, which in one point he says the young are not good students of political science. I don't think he really believes that because he then goes on to say what I mean by the young could be young in years or young in age, which means the elderly could be ready for political science or maybe not so they don't have to be quite so old. But apart from that, he isn't addressing, I think he's addressing the elderly and showing them something about the noble, I think he's addressing the young and he may be trying to qualify some of their boldness and eagerness to the noble.
This is a, this, I know I'm talking about the old and the young and not about the gentleman in the philosopher, I haven't completely forgot your question, Alex, but he works in the same way and it's easier to understand when I talk about the old and the young, you know, in the rhetoric, Aristotle has this wonderful treatment of the young and the old and then finally those in the prime of life and their characteristics of each. And you can, you probably know what they are in a word. The young are kind of, the young are hopeful, they've got their whole lives ahead of them. They love the noble, they jump into things, the elderly are the opposite, they're kind of pessimistic, whereas the young are optimistic because they've lived through so much, they've seen all kinds of things that have gone wrong, they have experience and that does not make them hopeful.
So which would be the better address see of Aristotle's ethics? It's a question that you have to, you have to know how you understand Aristotle's ethics, know how to answer that question. But let's say that Aristotle talked, let's talk, courage is the virtue, he is the first one he discusses, and he says the courageous person acts for the sake of the noble, no other motivation, it's this kind of pure thing. And he says a lot more about it.
But how would that address the elderly who are pessimistic, they would be a little cautious about that. But if he could persuade the elderly of the noble, he would be almost rejuvenating them, making them young again, reminding them of what they once knew and felt and experienced when they were young. So he talks about the noble for the sake of the elderly, not because they're bringing their sad experience to the test, but because they need to be educated. How would the young react to that?
Well, they're eager for the noble, but what Aristotle also says in talking about courage are other things, about the fear that courage is not conquering fear, it's being disposed to fear properly. Courage is a mean between extremes, so that the reckless, that's an example of one of the extremes, that is a vice in Aristotle's game. What he's doing for the young and proposing courage is countering our destiny, their tendency to recklessness, their optimism, letting them understand that they might die when they go out on that battlefield of the sake of the noble and sacrificing their lives for the noble. He's making them a bit more cautious now to make them a bit more cautious and to make the elderly a bit bolder.
Where do you end up? At the mean, you end up with courage. So he's talking, but he's talking to cowardly types and to reckless types, right? And he says, he's saying different things to each other, beginning with where they are.
What is his message to them? It's the same message, the message is courage. That's where he's leading them. He's leading them from where they are to this middle state in which they can demonstrate virtue.
Now, any questions on that? How would that work with the next question would be? How does that work? With the one you call the gentleman and the philosophy, if he's addressing, would be philosophers.
I guess they might be associated with the young because at least they're open to questioning. And that sounds like one of the characteristics to which he attributes to the young. He says he wants those who are for his addresses. That's where the word gentleman doesn't occur when he speaks about his audience.
He says he would like those who are well brought up in their habits. They have been habituated correctly. A bit ambiguous because the passive voice is also the middle voice in the case of his verb to lead. And so it could also mean they bring themselves up well.
They habituate themselves well. And that presents a little bit more of an active situation for these people he'd like his address is. I think the ambiguity of that verb, which is both passive and middle, being done to and doing it yourself, doing to yourself is intended. And both of those things go into education.
Education is something that people give to your teachers. It's also something that you receive and receiving is something active. And so Aristotle wants, I would say, addresses who are able to do both. And so to the ones who are well brought up in their habits, he's telling them you have to be concerned with your own habits.
You have to examine them. Know what they are. That's quite specific at the end of book two when he says, know yourself. And he uses the same verb, but no, as is used in the temple, the Delphi, gignosco, know yourself.
And you know yourself. Where you are inclined, what are your habits? You go too far to recklessness are too far to college. Which direction do you go in?
And then you try to hit the main devices at the end of book two by overshooting or undershooting. Know yourself and then overshoot or undershoot as is appropriate. So if those well brought up in their habits, he's telling them to get on with improving yourself. He's not basing it on what they've already been already have learned by way of their habituation.
He's trying to help them along to educate them. Well, let me believe that the the the concretely might be a little inclined to their bad habits and that would have to be compensated by overshooting. So he's speaking to so he's speaking to the gentleman who we might think, oh, he already knows what he has to know. He knows the first principles already.
He got them from his habituation. That's the audience of the ethics. If the philosophy is the audience or potential philosophy, it's because he's watching what Aristotle has to tell to the gentleman and therefore learning the limits of the gentleman and Aristotle's teaching to the gentleman. But suppose he's talking to the philosopher too in the same way.
Perhaps they have not been as aware of the extent to which they too have habits that determine who who they are. It's not just that they make themselves. It's not just that they make their choices free from other determinations. Philosophers are not as free as they might think.
That could be the lesson for the philosopher or the gentleman. The lesson is you are much more free than you might think if you base who you are on the habits you have received from your parents, from others, especially from the laws. So you can have you can do what I did with the young and the old, with the reckless and the cowardly. You can do it with the gentleman and the philosophy too.
They're part of the same universe. They get the same teaching, but from different perspectives, they have different tendencies toward different extremes. And Aristotle's trying to talk to both of them and bring them together into the human fold. And I would say into the city, since humans, philosophers as well are political by nature.
Yeah, I have a quick question just to return to the end of book one of the ethics. Could you talk a little bit about the role between chance and piety? Whenever I read his passage, or I remember studying the ethics when I was freshman year in college, and you read what he has to say about chance and they're like, oh, all the vicissitudes of life, well, I can pray and burn oxide to Zeus and ill fortune still befalls. And so how does he treat that?
The relationship between the two as the book unfolds. Well, ill fortune still befalls. I would say not no matter. You cannot eliminate chance, no matter what you do, it's certainly not by praying to the gods.
If that's what you wanted the gods to do for you, I think Aristotle would think would say that's a terrible mistake. You will be disillusioned. They're not going to do that. Moreover, if you're relying on them, you're not relying on your self.
I mean, your job is to make the best of what you have been given by the gods or by nature. You have to make the best of what you have been given. It is up to you. And so that kind of reliance on the gods, I think Aristotle would even consider ampeous because it in a way is rejecting what God has given you, what has God given you, his given you the capacity to think.
That's a big one. The capacity to reason, the capacity to love, the capacity to become friends with other human beings, the capacity to deliberate with other human beings in political life, the capacity to nurture your children in your family, to love your spouse and to take care of your parents. You have been given quite a number of blessings and with those blessings, go responsibilities and to simply pray to the gods is a compound. If that's if you want the gods to take care of everything, fight, I think the sign of divine, but never such is that the gods don't do that, Boris, because then we can do it.
And then we can live up to the potential that we have as human beings. Mary, you kind of touched on this. I kind of want to keep this question of piety for instead of a moment. What is the content of this?
Is it meant to use common modern parlance, which might be a mistake? Is it like a civic piety? I mean, you mentioned the graces and redimathes, but is Aristotle sort of tapping into? Yeah, I guess I don't say what you just said.
It's like it's hard for me to see Aristotle speaking to people who sort of take Zeus and Apollo in these guys very seriously on one hand. On the other hand, he doesn't mention the graces and redimathes, or I guess there's two different ways I'm coming at this one is what is piety for Aristotle? Is it in any way sort of an accord with conventional religion, or is it something else? And then the second question maybe is what is the divine?
You talk about divine beneficence? Is Aristotle here just where's the unmoved mover and the cause and then necessity and all that? Is that there playing any role or is this like a is this like a political? Yes, a political religion.
Yeah. I don't know if that's framed the right way, but even if it were, and I don't I don't rule that act. I mean, but he is very selective about the Greek mythology that he uses, and he criticizes most of it. And he invents what he wants.
I mean, like the braces, I think he has. I hope that's not going too far, but at least he has given them a role in the city. Right. And so how does he know that the braces exist?
Because he takes he sees us in authority, but I've already said, you know, it's more about them than he sees he doesn't have much to say about us gives them names. So where does that come from? That such braces could be introduced by Aristotle into the city as part of a civil really that is that civil religion? You know, political religion, the thing Abraham Lincoln talks about your political religion.
Well, it doesn't come from Greek mythology, it doesn't come from any authority. It certainly doesn't come from he sees it or Homer. It comes from Aristotle's perception of the goodness of the cosmos. Now that it takes the form of these three devotees and that they're women and that they dance together.
Their other way that that is a wonderful way that he has of expressing it, I think. And it is, but where it comes from is from his assumption that he makes from the beginning. And that is his experience. He would trace it to his experience of life.
And that is the goodness of nature and the cosmos. And if there is a God, it is that goodness of God. He's not ruling out a divine being, but he has an experience of that. He raises the question of forgetting away.
Well, not entirely from chance because I have said, chance does play a major role. You can't eliminate it. And that Aristotle would see is a good thing. On the other hand, you better do the best you can and try not to be overwhelmed by it.
I didn't say that second part, but anyway, so the goodness of nature that is implied when he says, it's happiness in but one is happiness a divine gift, a gift of the gods. Or does it come to us in some other way? Does it come to us by our own efforts, for example, or by I think he says, by habituation brings up that or is it some kind of or he has a number of possibilities. And he doesn't know he doesn't say that it is a gift from God.
He actually says, we'll discuss this elsewhere and never does or in another work, never does. He cannot say that it is a gift from God in any kind of Christian sense. But he says that even if it's not a divine gift, it's still divine because it is something divine that we have if we can achieve happiness because it's the best thing that we have. And so that's he's bringing the divine in that way without making a prior assumption or having a prior investigation about the unmoved mover, at least at that point in the end.
That's not enough of that. That's a huge question, but at least it's a way I can address your question. Thank you, Mary. So looking at the title of your book, right, Aristotle's Discovery of the Humid, you imagine like Plato and Socrates off stage.
I mean, like Mary, what the hell? Come on. Yeah, did you forget that someone else? Or even I mean, I would go even further, what about Homer?
Homer, right? So obviously you're aware of this. So what do you mean by this title? Well, what does distinctive about Aristotle's approach to the human that deserves the discovery?
Well, it has to be, as I said before, I keep going back to that formula because you need something to pin it on and then you go off in all kinds of making much more complex and see as manifestations and not make it formulaic anymore. I want you to talk about it, but it does does Homer and it may be a bit easier with Homer than Socrates, but does Homer show this piety in the sense of the human as in between beast and God. It seems to me on the one hand the gods are in Homer are a bit too close to the human. I mean, they come and fight alongside them.
Some of those battles and boy, does a discus have a good, not an easy trip home. That would be the wrong way put it, of course, but he does have a Athena at his side. Athena appears to him. I mean, they could be walking along together.
They could be holding hands, I suppose, if they wanted to, you know, on the beaches of Sanatheta telling him what to do once you get home, let me make you into this old band. No one will recognize you. That's a little close to Aristotle's text because there is a distance between human and divine. Tiety is preserving that distance between human and divine and Homer does not do it.
And therefore, the heroes in Homer expect more of the divine. Then Aristotle would say it's possible. I won't say they follow their knees and pray, but they do say, mama, go to Zeus, go to the big one and get a favor for me. Well, that's kind of like praying in a way.
Your question, Greg. So it, Homer has them to close and does he, and yet do his heroes show, they do show a lot of human dignity, but does it go as far as Aristotle would like it to go with his understanding of the ethical and intellectual virtues? I think that they act too much as beast at times. They're too close to beast and too close to the gods.
And so they don't maintain, they don't discover. Homer doesn't discover and his carriages do not maintain that in between state, between beast and divine. They're too beastly and they're too divine, like, or assuming that they are divine, like, and can get the gods to do what they want. God's favoring them.
God taking a side in that Trojan War. That's what the Greeks think is going to happen. And they do. And then the Troptons think that they're do they are taking.
They have other gods who take their side. So one other thing at home, and that does the direct answer to your question, although you may not find it acceptable. I mean, but think of two things. Think of Achilles fighting with the God, the river God.
What's his name? Something or something. Yeah. And there's an interesting one.
Exactly the stance of someone who sees a great distance between himself and the divine, which Aristotle would maintain. If you are without you are a guard or beast, if you cannot live in the city, how much do these Homeric heroes live in a city and Aristotle sense? Remember, there's the other passage where captors ready to face Achilles and battle finally. And he says, well, if whoever dies, let the other one return the body to his people.
And Achilles says, there can be no such old. Let's take old. So that's what the hector wants to do. Let's take an oath as they've gone to do this.
We're going to return the body of horses. And Achilles says, there can be no oath between you and me. But human beings can have oaths between them, even if they're fighting on opposite sides. In other words, Achilles says, we don't have the same gods.
We don't have, and I won't put it in terms of saying gods, we don't have a humanity in common. And Aristotle would say, that's one of the things the misleading teaching stuff on. How about that? Would you want the difficult one?
But play them. Yeah. Well, I mean, we had Peter Aaron's door for on, for example. And obviously Homer's presentation of Herod virtue lacks the definiteness, the precision, thoroughness of Aristotle's treatment of the ethics, where the whole psychology really sort of brought to the fore.
But there is that moment in the Scamander one where Achilles says, I'm going to die just like an shepherd. And you get a sense that Homer's showing you that perhaps in relation to the gods, there's not much difference between Achilles and ordinary personess Achilles would like. But I think obviously the difficult case in Socrates or Plato, right? Where what's the what do you see as a principle of difference in their treatment or appreciation of the human that gives Aristotle this sort of, right of place, if you will?
Well, I mean, that is a question that we could spend the rest of the time on. And it is almost another book, but I owe you some kind of answer. So we can go through certain things in which they differ and see if they add up to anything or that's one way of doing it, or I can just say what I think is the difference. But the difference is I've already alluded to the fact that there is nothing in the platonic purpose that says human beings are political by nature.
The discovery of the human going along with that discovery is a statement that humans are political by nature, which means their lives are lived in cities, not outside cities, which would be characteristic of beast and gods. Okay, so there is no treatment of friendship in the platonic corpus, quite as detailed with different kinds. I mean, the treatment of friendship you find in Plato is the list, that's the dialogue on friendship. And it ends in Aporilla, you know, a dilemma, they upper-plexity, that's how I'm using Aporilla.
They don't have an answer to that. And Aristotle, Aristotle's big and perplexities too, he owes that to Socrates. But he says in book seven, some perplexities, he's going to go through all of the perplexities he can come up with about Socrates' positions, especially the one knowledge is virtue. And he says, some perplexities will remain and some perplexities will be resolved.
Aristotle does a bit of both, whereas, resolving and maintaining perplexity, whereas I think perplexity is more characteristic of Plato and Plato's Socrates. So there's no, if friendship is not just, there are perplexities in his discussion, Aristotle's discussion of friendship, but there are also many statements about friendship, different kinds of friendship, and that's something you don't find in Plato's corpus. There's the treatment of the family in the city, the texts were suggesting that it was Socrates' last Plato, who discovered the human, not Aristotle. You could get some evidence for that is that famous statement that Cicero made about how Socrates brought philosophy down from the heavens into the cities and the homes of human beings, raising questions about justice and virtue and the human things.
Or you could say a bit of more evidence for your position that it is Socrates, I should be looking at to find the discover of the human might be Strauss' city in man, because Strauss says, and he pulls that passage of Cicero when he does so. Strauss says that Socrates is the founder of political philosophy. So how then he's just making the case against me? What is it that Aristotle does?
Well, he treats families in the cities differently from Plato, and that's just one aspect of all of the other things I mentioned. What this, this, this, and this. I'm going to say Socrates now, because it's Socrates who's the founder of political velocity, rather than referring to Plato's loss. Socrates treats families and cities in the republic, and what happens to families is he makes much of them.
He makes so much of them. They become one of them becomes the city becomes a family. He does not treat the family in the republic as having some kind of integrity or wholeness of its own. He simply makes the family into the political community with the community of property and the community of wives and children.
So the family somehow disappears for Socrates. He doesn't bring philosophy into the family. If anyone brings philosophy into the family, it would be Aristotle and in the books on friendship, he finds models for different kinds of regimes and ultimately for a philosophic friendship in the friendship between husband and wife. The how about Socrates bringing philosophy down into the city?
Well, he doesn't see. He does and he doesn't. If it's the city and the republic, that's not a city in which philosophy can come insofar as the cave metaphor is in place and the cave is not open to the light outside the cave. If philosophy comes into the city, he must be compelled and he is forced to rule.
At least those words are used. It's not like philosophy belongs in the city in any way. So, well, what about Plato in his portrayal of Socrates and the republic, putting addressing Cicero's statement about Socrates bringing philosophy down into the homes and cities? It doesn't like him.
Socrates really does that in the republic. I'm sure there will be a rebuttal here, but I'm not going to get myself to myself, but that's not my job. So, if you look at what Aristotle does, he would be the one who not only brings philosophy down into the city by finding models, both of politics, political regimes and families, and also finding models of friendships. And I would say friendships that models, reflections of philosophic friendships in the friendship of husband and wife.
He does that in the ethics and he brings philosophy into the cities by having understanding cities as reflections of philosophers looking for the truth and looking for a common good, maybe for all human beings, but not yet finding it in cities. There is a kind of political friendship that he talks about in book nine, he calls it homo naya, he calls it political friendship, quote unquote. And it is agreeing about some fundamental political things about who should rule one for how long and so on, a kind of light-mindedness of citizens. But that is a reflection of philosophers pursuing the truth together.
It's not philosophic friendship. They're different. I'm not assimilating all of these things. But it's a reflection of a philosophic friendship.
It is Aristotle who brings philosophy into the homes and into the cities. There's a road in the sense that he should have said, Aristotle, I'm just being a little flippant here. Socrates makes a big step in the direction of Aristotle. Well, I just want to make sure that folks don't understand that the title is Aristotle's Discovery of the Human Piding Politics and the Nicomachean Ethics.
But one could be sort of think that that's the only things that you address in the book, and that's mistaken. I mean, your book is basically a commentary on the entirety of the Nicomachean Ethics. You have eight chapters devoted to the 10 books. And so it goes all the way through.
So folks want to learn more about you're just touching on friendship. For example, you have a little chapter on that chapter on Magnanimity. And sort of the divine is woven through the text. It seems to me, these questions.
It is. I mean, I think the topic is so broad that it's not about one thing in particular, the whole of the ethics fits into this framework. And it's not always talking about the divine, but it's always there in a way. Every virtue is somehow this, and I quote, I could find this in between status between beast and not what what what about friendship?
He talks about friendship is one of the greatest blessings that human beings have. He says, no, at the beginning of book, no one would choose to live without friends. But friends, friendship is something that occurs and it's possible only in that in between state between beast and God, as he describes friendship, because it is giving and receiving in turn, it is reciprocal. He says, whatever we call, there's one point where he talks about friendship between men and gods, but he generally says that's not possible.
He says if there is so much equality, inequality between two beings, they cannot be friends with each other. If the inequality is so great, and he gives the example as between a human being and a god. So whatever relationship we have to the god, we cannot say that we are friends to the god. That is not a proper relationship, because that would be treating our relationship with the divine as if it were simply reciprocal.
For sure. So anyway, the friendship is a really important part of my book, as is everything in that book, including greatness of soul and justice. And of course, the intellectual virtues and prudence, which he talks about in book six, it's all about this way in which we look up to what is beyond us and we maintain our divine, something divine about ourselves by not degrading ourselves on what is belongs. That's a good note to transition, Mary, with your permission.
Did you say a few words about your intellectual biography? What got you interested in? What was your socratic turn? I imagined you were a it's an Aristotelian trick.
Let me try to say something interesting about Aristotle, as well as about my intellectual autobiography. Aristotle keeps starting over. He's always using that expression. We're going to have another beginning in some obvious spots, but it's all over the place and all of his works.
Even says at the end of the ethics, we need another beginning, it's going to be the politics. So it really is all over. So I think that I have not a socratic turn, but I have many and one say to other beginnings, but those beginnings that Aristotle takes are always built in what comes before. There's never an absolute beginning by Aristotle.
You know, he does raise the question of how to begin four chapters in to the ethics after he's already begun. And he says it's a perplexity that Plato was well perplexed about how to begin something, but each beginning builds on what came before. So there's not an absolute beginning for Aristotle, but you have to understand how many new things come into play. I don't know if I can say a certain number, but I remember many of my teachers.
I think I don't want to leave anyone out and I hate to do that, but there were some that were really formative and it would not be just if I left out my teacher of English literature who taught me in high school sophomore and senior year. She was a nun of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. I went to a boarding school run by those nuns, a Catholic boarding school, and she was wonderful. She was a nun from St.
Louis. It was a kind of a more of a cosmopolitan audience was founded in France and Sacred Heart nuns. And she taught many wonderful works of literature and especially Shakespeare. My Socratic turn was someone who introduced to me her name is Mother Marhainik.
They called him mother, not sister in those old fashion days in which I when I was in high school, Mother Marhainik, introduced me to Shakespeare. And I loved Shakespeare. So I decided to go to college in major in English. And so I met someone else.
I met a student of Strauss's from the University of Chicago named Paul Eidelberg. Anyone ever heard of him? He wrote a book on the founding, the founding convention, arguing that the founders found an Aristotelian mixed regime. He wrote other books with only one he'd read to when I knew him.
He taught me a sophomore level course at Sweet Bear College on American politics. And we did founding and we did everything. Congress, we had all the institutions of American politics, and we did some kind of law in that course in public administration. It was a two semester survey.
And I was just fascinated by it. I never had that kind of interest in politics before. And I began to see that some of those things about Shakespeare, you know, all those heroes and the good ones and the bad ones and all the things they were trying to accomplish, that they were people trying to do that, namely the founding fathers and others in the course of American history like Abraham Lincoln, who he loved and whom I loved as well. So he suggested I eventually go on to graduate school and that I go to graduate school to study with Herbert Storing and Joseph Proxie by then Leo Strauss had left the University of Chicago and he was at Claremont.
So on I went and those are the two teachers who I think most made me what I am today. They were simply great men and they are what they are the ideal of what a teacher is, a platonic idea of a teacher. And I have been so blessed to have those four models of teachers, all of them, who have set me on this path. Everyone has a teacher that turns them around.
But I had an hours to till again course where this beginning is beginning. I went to the University of Chicago to follow the interest I had developed with the help of Paul Eidberg in American politics and to study with Herbert Storing. Herbert Storing wasn't teaching my first semester at Chicago. Joseph Proxie was the other name that Eidberg had told me about.
So I took courses from him and that was a turning point. I still took every course that Storing taught and every course that Proxie taught. But I suppose Joseph Proxie was my greatest mentor. Well, thank you Mary.
Thank you for us to start going. If you have a story in particular, any particular memory about Proxie or Storing or your favorite memory or favorite class or a favorite anything? Favorite anything? I mean, oh great.
I mean, they were part of my life. I mean, both of them for so long that this is, well, you know, I'm here and you have visited us at our summer place, Catch Lake. I heard you ask one person, what is the favorite place you've ever visited? And I was trying to be a co-player with that.
I don't like to go anywhere, you know. And then, oh, my favorite place I visited was Catch Lake. I came here when I was still in Bratchford's room to visit Herbert Storing and his family. And they had cottages.
They rented a candy and I spent a summer here with another student of theirs who Joseph Proxie had put me in touch with and Churney. He spent a summer with the Storing family. Do I have memories? I have memories of Storing and his wife, who was whom I was very close as well, reading PG Woodhouse.
One loved PG Woodhouse. The other thought he was very stupid. But there's a memory I have. But Storing would read out loud to his children, PG Woodhouse.
Was his name Bert from Wooster? It's been a long time, but I remember that. Joseph Proxie, I mean, the jokes he told in class, people have talked about that in the stories he tells, the down-to-earth stories that you will always bring, what he's talking about alive for us. I mean, he taught me how to read and he taught me how to think.
And he gave me a example of someone that I could love, because all my heart and soul. Wow. That's a pretty fitting tribute. I almost feel like there's nowhere to really follow up.
Now Greg's going to go into his silly questions. The place I visited though, Hachlai, Proxie, is here several times. Because of Storing College is here, and Storing College is still here. So I associate with Proxie coming here to visit too.
He and her starring were just very best friends and their wives were friends as well. And so I visited it. And then I decided I would have to buy a place here myself. And so that's not exactly a visit.
He's visiting someplace and so loving it. You make it your own. And I have made this place my own since 1979 when we bought our first cottage here. We bought another N83.
And I have shared this not only with the storeings and prophecies in the other visitors. I've shared it with my graduate students where I've talked. We've had them here for weeks, weekends, conferences, and they have learned here at Hachlai and played here at Hachlai with us. And just for those at home, I mean, this is relatively rustic.
It's out in Upstate New York. It's a beautiful scenery. And you've been going there like you said since 1979. So it's not since 1979.
So we don't go anywhere. We don't we've gone to anyone a few times, but you know, it's minor compared to our vacations here. I just have a couple final questions, Mary. I'm feel free to answer these are not.
But do you have a favorite philosopher? Well, it's easy to say our style. I think I have to say Shakespeare. Oh, very nice.
Do you have a favorite play of Shakespeare's? Oh, what to do about nothing? Oh, it's an interesting choice. Very cool.
Do you have a favorite work of literature? Meaning a novel, not a book. Yes. William Faulkness, go down Moses.
Oh, down Moses. That's pretty good. I recommend it. I've actually taught it in my American political novel for several times.
Very nice. I'm very sure what's your first car? A Ford Mustang. Come on.
1964. White was red interior. A stick shift. When I graduated from high school.
Wow. That's a beautiful car. Yeah. Well, Mary, it's been a pleasure.
The book. I enjoyed it too. Very much. I mean, thank you for having me.
I just put me on the air before asking these questions and following up and listening to me. As you can see, I have taught the ethics for many years. Yeah. Yeah, for sure.
It's been an honor, Mary. It's been a great thing. David said a bunch of us have reached out to us saying why Mary Nichols is on. So now we have now we have the book once against aerosol discovery to human piety and politics and then the coming into ethics with Notre Dame press anywhere you can pick it up.
Go and go and do it. Don't forget to like, rate, and there are many other fine books. Over and over the island, by the way. Yeah.
Well, right. And there's of course your book on Airsoft and East of the Republic of the politics. Right. That's right.
All right. Well, thanks again, Mary and to all the listeners. Don't forget to pick up Mary's book, but also rate us, review us, subscribe, and we'll see you next time.