A while ago, I told some people about the fascinating experience that reading Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics entailed for me. A few queries about the Ethics followed. Not because I am an expert on this book or anything, but because I read more of it – and about it! – than the others present. And I can very much not help myself, sharing my enthusiasm for anything slightly related to the humanities… During that conversation I got an interesting question that fit the ethos of the Nicomachean Ethics: Why? Why read a philosophical treatise from more than two millennia ago? Philosophy has moved on since then, after all. Nobody has the spare time – and neither do their friends – to live the good life as proposed by Aristotle in the company he envisioned. The author of the Nichomachean Ethics was also famously misogynist and harbored many other views that do not fit our modern societies, with their human rights and the like. His stance on slavery was at best ambiguous and at worst tacit resignation, for crying out loud!¹ So let us today discuss that monosyllabic question – why? Because I wish for others that very same experience that I had with the Nichomachean Ethics. But there are also more practical reasons to dust off this tome.

This blog is also available in Dutch.

Aristotle and the Nicomachean Ethics

Nowadays the name ‘Aristotle’ is almost synonymous with ancient Greece. An impressive feat for a native from Greece’s northern neighbor Macedon!³ Though his legacy, as they say, would prove to be far less mortal.

Much of Aristotle’s work – including his philosophical treatises intended for a broader audience – has sadly been lost to history.⁴ But from what we know, we can observe a few through-lines. Like Plato, Aristotle aimed to examine people’s views in order to discern their foundations and justifications. Furthermore, he was interested in how human beings ought to shape their existence in order to live a good life. And that is by and large the subject of the Nichomachean Ethics.⁵ This work most likely consists of notes Aristotle took in preparation for his lectures on ethics. The introduction and eventual acceptance of ethics as an independent subject that should be taught as such, is actually one of Aristotle’s many achievements.⁶ There is still scholarly debate on the designation of the work as the Nicomachean Ethics, by the way. Some think that Nicomachus was the person who organized the notes as they would later circulate. Others propose that the notes where dedicated to the then infant Nicomachus.⁷ Though, who dedicates their teaching preparations and, if so, why would Aristotle only do this so rarely? This discussion naturally does not subtract from the work itself.

And it is difficult to summarize such a layered work in a few sentences. I won’t attempt that here, but mark this as a subject for a future blog. For our current purpose, the reasons why one should read this book in the first place, it is important to know a few things. The Nicomachean Ethics is not a text that tries to convince the reader, but a guide to living a good life for those who have already decided on that course.⁸ This guidance mainly pertains to perfecting humans’ relevant function in this respect. Which is, according to the philosopher, using our reason to live a life on which we regularly reflect.⁹ Moreover, we are instructed to cultivate habits which foster both morality and wisdom. And this prominently include our relationships to others – specifically our friendships.¹⁰ Aristotle’s purview here is broader than most modern understandings of morality, but not everything we would expect from an ethical treatise is present here.¹¹ The work is, for instance, not focused on helping others, perse – though the Nicomachean Ethics does not exclude the importance thereof.¹²

The ethics presented here can be characterized as a practical science.¹³ And one that is more or less autonomous. As a result, we do not have to accept Aristotle’s other ideas or read his other works to find use for the Nicomachean Ethics, at least on a first read.¹⁴ But the aforementioned problematic aspects of Aristotle’s views also pertain to these notes. Considering the valid criticisms of parts of these notes and all the philosophical works that were written since, why then dedicate our limited time on this earth to reading them?

Knowledge about the Past

First and foremost – and especially when you write a blog that regular features antiqutiy – Aristotle constitutes a historical source. We already saw that Aristotle himself is not a mere legendary figure who was ascribed authorative philosophical insights. He was a person who lived in a historical time and place. And he found himself involved with or impacted by many of the happenings in his time. His tutelage of Alexander III, for instance, once and for all proves that teaching can have as great an impact as any imaginable human activity! Having said that, it is important to establish what historical facts we we can and cannot derive from the man’s works, like the Nicomachean Ethics.

In the first place, Aristotle’s works inform us about the intellectual history of the subjects he discusses. Especially because of his immense influence, which we discuss in more detail below, knowing a bit about Aristotle teaches us about the roots of fields as far flung as the hard sciences and – indeed – ethics.¹⁵ It is nigh impossible to understand some writers from the European Middle Ages like Dante Alighieri, to name but one example, without some knowledge of Aristotle and the Nichomachean Ethics.¹⁶ The Nicomachean Ethics helps us reconstruct the long and winding road of understanding.

Furthermore, apart from the aspirations it fosters in its readers, the Nicomachean Ethics also tells us about the world in that the author inhabited and in which his ideas and teachings had their more immediate impact. And the Nicomachean Ethics was both written within and as a reaction to the societies inhabited Aristotle, as well as influencing them.¹⁷ The way in which the likes of Plato and Aristolte wrote philosophy, for instance, also represents a shift in the local literature at the time.¹⁸ It thus teaches us about the ancient Greece and Macedon that the philosopher encountered before he set reed pen to papyrus. Moreover, this knowledge is not confined to the ancient Aegean. Because Aristotle always tried to be as broad in his scientific inquiry as he could, including with his ethics, and he therefore also incorporated information from other ancient cultures known to him.¹⁹

All these remarks are, as you may have expected in a blog about philosophy, qualified. The Nicomachean Ethics is a book about how one may live one version of a good life and some parts of it may not be connected to what we may want to know about the actual human experience of the ancient past. But even these parts can prove to be useful, when we consider the aforementioned influence that the book would ultimately have later down the line.

Philosophical Lineages

As we already discussed, the works of Aristotle – as far as they were preserved – turned out to be widely influential. The Nicomachean Ethics, as well as the writings on politics, rhetoric, literature, and (meta)physics that were ascribed to him, have influenced many thinkers since antiquity – from the European Middle Ages to a global reach in the modern age.²⁰ And the latter reach is at least in part made possible, because currently well-known philosophers and other thinkers have incorporated Aristotle and his texts, including the Nicomachean Ethics, in their own ideas for living a good life.

It is therefore in a very real sense difficult to understand the current world that we live in, from people’s most prevalent views to the very societal structures that shape our existence, without knowledge of ancient philosophers and especially Aristotle. Because so much of the contemplating done in the last two thousand years and change is, to put it simply, a continuation of and a reaction to Aristotle and his surviving writings.²¹ As such, to read these writings is a great addition to one’s bildung – see what I did there? – independent of the continent one happens to reside on.²²

Allow me to mention two influential public intellectuals who were themselves specifically inspired by the Nicomachean Ethis. Alasdair MacIntyre’s argument that virtue ethics should play a bigger role in society, most famously set out in his magnum opus After Virtue, is in large part based on Aristotle’s elaboration of the same concept.²³ And the version of the capabilities approach to structuring our lives and polities that is advocated Martha Nussbaum – which could bring the further emancipation of disabled people, to mention but one of her examples – can be connected to many of the insights of Macedon’s second most famous native.²⁴ These thinkers see value in the perspectives presented in the Nicomachean Ethics, even though they are far removed from them across many centuries and a large distance. And this coincidentally constitutes the third reason why it is still rewarding to read this tome in our own era.

The Power of Perspective

One of the benefits of studying and communicating the insights of the humanities in general, I think, is the availability of a reservoir of perspectives to enrich our own.²⁵ If we end up agreeing with such other views, we can incorporate them in our own thinking. And if we disagree with these perspectives, we can learn from the explicit arguments we need to construct to reject hem. Aristotle’s mistakes are informative, because they require us to thoroughly investigate his reasoning.²⁶ But perhaps most fruitfully, when we engage in dialogue with ancient authors like Aristotle we may arrive at entirely novel ideas that are better suited to a more humane existence for all earth’s inhabitants than both his views and our own could even be. But we cannot only enhance our own perspectives through reading books like the Nicomachean Ethics, we may also develop a sense for when some of the more unwelcome ideas present in this book surface in the contemporary media landscape and in this way (continue to) make unassuming forays in people’s world views.

It is possibly to identify survivals from older works of philosophy, such as the Nicomachean Ethics, which still (partly) characterize our thinking in ways we are not directly aware of.²⁷ And through these identifications, we can confront some of the bigotry such survivals may have brought with them. As such, Aristotle’s problematic views are – perhaps counter-intuitively – also interesting to read. Because they do constitute a dire warning to us in the here and now. A warning about how the many faces of bigotry have an unimaginably long history – they were already present, even so many thousands of years ago! – and that we have to remain vigilant against them. This is all the more relevant today, at the halfwaypoint of the third decade of the twenty first century. The humanities may not have the prestige they once enjoyed, their subjects are nonetheless still used by people with malicious intentions to ‘justify’ many kinds of oppression. And this includes ideas – be it accurate or later fabrications – that are said to originate in the same antqituiy wherein Aristotle lived and composed his works.²⁸

Having said that, the less than savory products of Aritotle’s mind, including those that are expressed in the Nicomachean Ethics, do of course still remain.²⁹ One should therefore always read such works with a critical eye. Even if one reads the work for the fourth reason I want to bring up today: fun.

Conclusion: Fun

Because, in addition to knowledge about the past, philosophical lineages, and different perspectives, there is another thing that maintains interest in this work: it is frankly a joy to read This may come as a surprise to some of you. After all, many prominent judgments on the literary qualities of the Nicomachean Ethics are harsh. These notes, it is said cannot hold a candle to the works that Aritotle intended to be circulated but were lost to the sands of time.³⁰ I myself, and this is completely and totally subjective, find the work beautiful. The structure of the whole thing – from the chapters, paragraphs, and alineas down to single sentences – is just of a breathtaking elegance. And the way in which Aristotle systematically builds out this guide for living a good life is very pleasing to my academic and aesthetic sensibilities.³¹ But most of all, this book gives me access to another world.

And that world is very alien and far away, it is true. Not in the least because of the aforementioned opinions and attitudes we do want to keep alien and far away. Although it is a sad fact that they never really disappeared – not even for a while.³² As such, the fun in the reading is perhaps also the joy in being inoculated, to the extent to which that is possible through one work, against both ancient and modern dis- and misinformation. In this regard, though evidently not as the philosopher himself would have intended, the Nicomachean perhaps does point us to one aspect of living a good live.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.

Subscribe and never miss a blog!

Submit

References

1. Gerard J. Hughes, The Routledge Guidebook to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Abbingdon: Routledge, 2013), p. 238. On Aristotle’s opinion of women, see: Sophia M. Connell, Aristotle on Women: Physiology, Psychology, and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), p. 1, 19; Thomas M. Olshewsky, “Aristotle’s Women”, in: D.M. Spitzer (ed.), Studies in Ancient Greek Philosophy in Honor of Professor Anthony Preus (London: Routledge, 2023), p. 204-210. Coincidentally, while Aristotle’s worst stance on slavery can be found in his Politics, a slightly more humane approach – slavery conceived as a tyrannical relationship between two persons – can be found in the book we discuss today, the Nichomachean Ethics, see: Donald L. Ross, “Aristotle’s Ambivalence on Slavery”, Hermathena 2008, 135 (184), p. 53, 56.
3. [It is still a matter of debate whether the Macedonians saw themselves or were seen as being Greeks, see: Eugene N. Borza, “Appendix B: Greek and Macedonian Ethnicity”, in: James Romm (ed.), The Landmark Arrian: The Campaigns of Alexander (New York: Anchor Books, 2012), p. 333-336./efn_note] Hailing from a family of physicians with ties to the Macedonian royal court, Aristotle arrived in Athens in 367 BCE at age 17 and there he studied, wrote, and taught at the Academy of the reputed philosopher Plato. During the political turbulent time that coincided with the latter’s death in 347 BCE, Aristotle found himself back in Macedon. Here he tutored the crown prince, the later king Alexander III – also known as ‘Alexander the Great’ to connoisseurs of brilliant battle tactics and senseless murder. While in Macedon, Aristotle’s wife Pythia died and he began relations with another woman, one Herpyllis, who would eventually bear his second son and the child most relevant to this blog: Nicomachus. Aristotle returned to Athens in 334 BCE and founded his own school, the Lyceum. But after Alexander III’s death in 323 BCE, Aristotle was charged with impiety. Denying the Athenians a second Socrates – the notoriously prying philosopher who was forced to commit suicide after similar charges – Aristotle left again and died in exile a year later.²Hughes, The Routledge Guidebook to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, p. 1-3; Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Reason: A History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance (New York: W.W. Norton, 2016), p. 230-231, 237.
4. Jonathan Barnes, Aristotle: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000), p. 4; Hughes, The Routledge Guidebook to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, p. 8; Gottlieb, The Dream of Reason, p. 229.
5. Hughes, The Routledge Guidebook to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, p. 7; Gottlieb, The Dream of Reason, p. 275-284.
6. Christine Pannier & Jean Verhaeghe, “Inleiding”, in: Christine Pannier & Jean Verhaeghe (eds.), Aristoteles’ Ethica (Groningen: Historische Uitgeverij, 1999), p. 13.
7. Ibidem, p. 10.
8. Ronald Polansky, “Introduction: Ethics as Practical Science”, in: Ronald Polansky (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 2, note 2; Myles Burnyeat, “Aristotle on Learning to be Good”, in: Amélie O. Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 81.
9. This is naturally not the only human function Aristotle distinghuishes, but it is the most practically relevant with regard to ethics, see: Polansky, “Introduction”, p. 6, note 11.
10. Patrick Lee Miller, “Finding Ourselves with Friends”, in: Ronald Polansky (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 319-320. For a beautiful illustration of this idea from the European Middle Ages, see: Barnes, Aristotle, p. 126.
11. Polansky, “Introduction”, p. 7.
12. Pierre Hadot, Filosofie als een Manier van Leven, translated by Zsuzsó Pennings (Amsterdam: Ambo, 2012), p. 90-91; Polansky, “Introduction”, p. 8. Regarding the positioning of the parts of the Nicomachean Ethics about friendship and adjacent topics, see: Pannier & Verhaeghe, “Inleiding”, p. 12.
13. Hadot, Filosofie als een Manier van Leven, p. 90-91.
14. Polansky, “Introduction”, p. 5. Though other works do rely upon or provide context for the Nicomachean Ethics, see: Barnes, Aristotle, p. 128.
15. Michiel Leezenberg & Gerard H. de Vries, Wetenschapsfilosofie voor Geesteswetenschappen (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), p. 26; Brad Inwood, Ethics after Aristotle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 1. On Aristotle’s versatility, see: Barns, “Aristotle”, p. 4.
16. Gottlieb, The Dream of Reason, p. 231; Roberto Lambertini, “À La Recherhe de L’Ésprit Laïqui in the Late Middle Ages”, in: Peter Linehan, Janet L. Nelson & Marios Costambeys (eds.), The Medieval World (Abbingdon: Routledge, 2018). p. 377.
17. Gottlieb, The Dream of Reason, p. 275-276.
18. Richard Rutherford, Classical Literature: A Concise History (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 3.
19. Polansky, “Introduction”, p. 5.
20. Edward Grant, “Aristotle and Aristotelianism”, in: Gary B. Ferngren, Edward J. Larson & Darrel W. Amundsen (eds.), The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition: An Encyclopedia (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 115-121; Christopher G. Vasillopulos, “The Globalization of Virtue: Reflections on Confucius and Aristotle”, in: Linggui Wang, China’s Development and the Construction of the Community with a Shared Future for Mankind (Singapore: Springer, 2023), p. 447-453; John Mizzoni, Ethics: The Basics (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2017), p. 23-28, 43-51.
21. Gottlieb, The Dream of Reason, p. 232-236.
22. Supra note 20.
23. Patrick Delaere, “Deugdenethiek: Oud en Nieuw”, in: Martin van Hees, Thomas Nys & Ingrid Robeyns (eds.), Basisboek Ethiek (Amsterdam: Boom Uitgeverij, 2019), p. 189.
24. For Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach and Aristotle, see in general: Martha Nussbaum, “Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defence of Aristotelian Essentialism”, Political Theory 1992, 20 (2), p. 205, 214–215. For the example of the further emancipation of disabled persons, see: Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 159-160.
25. The value of such perspectives also surfaced in my first blog on the environmental humanities.
26. Hughes, The Routledge Guidebook to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, p. 238. And sometimes, such as with his insights on gestation, the philosopher was so close to the actual situation as we now understand it with our modern science that both his triumphs and failures here are instructive, see: Gottlieb, The Dream of Reason, p. 230-231.
27. Alasdair Macintyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), p. 129; Gottlieb, The Dream of Reason, p. 232.
28. Curtis Dozier, “Hate Groups and Greco-Roman Antiquity Online: To Rehabilitate or Reconsider?”, in: Louie D. Valencia-García (ed.), Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History: Alt/Histories (Abbingdon: Routledge, 2020), p. 251-269.
29. Hughes, The Routledge Guidebook to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, p. 233-234.
30. Barnes, Aristotle, p. 5.
31. A disposition that would have pleased the ancient philosopher himself, see: Gottlieb, The Dream of Reason, p. 273.
32. Anthony Grayling, Towards the Light: The Story of the Struggles for Liberty and Rights that Made the Modern West (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 10-12. This subject requires a blog – or a proper dissertation! – on its own, but an illustrative example here is the longevity of racism, see: Peter Wade, Race: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).