PNTV: The Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle (#374)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another episode of Philosopher's Notes. TV Today we've got arguably one of the greatest books of all time, the Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics. No subtitle necessary. Aristotle wrote this 2500 years ago, although technically he didn't write this. This is a collection of his lecture notes named after his son. So imagine Aristotle lecturing on various ideas 2,500 years ago. Of course, he was a student of Plato's. He went and studied with him for a couple of decades as a young man. When Plato passed away, he was called back to Macedonia, where he was the tutor for the young prince who became Alexander the Great. Then he created his lyceum, which endured for hundreds of years. Truly astonishing thinker. Best lineage ever. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. This book, as you can imagine, is packed with wisdom. We are going to focus on some of my favorite practical ideas. And if I had to summarize or if one book came close to summarizing my approach to life, this one would be it. But we've got a philosopher's note with five of my favorite big ideas. Five of them here we're going to talk about today. We'll start at the very top. So Aristotle says that when you step back and you look at why we do anything, he says the ultimate target, the summum bonum, the highest good, is what we translate as happiness. So all of us here, oh, happiness. So happiness is the ultimate end of the ultimate target that we're all after. Everything we do is to get this deeper sense of happiness. Tall Ben Shahar calls it the ultimate currency. But the editor of this book makes it very clear that the word that we have translated into happiness, he always puts it into quotes. Happiness, because it means something much deeper than our current modern sense of happiness. The word was actually eudaimonia. Add an I and an A here to eudaimon. The person who embodied these ideals was a eudaimon. Two Greek words, you plus daimon. You is good. Daimon is soul. So the word that we translate as happiness literally meant in the ancient times, good soul. The ultimate target, the summum bonum of life, was to have a good soul, to have a good relationship with that inner guiding spirit that we all have. They called daimon. You do that, you're a eudaimon, which, again we translated as happiness, which is a very weak translation of means something closer to successfully actualizing your potential, expressing the best within yourself consistently. Then you're a eudaimon, and you experience eudaimonia. A sense of joy and a sense of well being that comes when you're flourishing. Even one of the greatest positive psychologists alive today, Martin Seligman, who kicked off the whole positive psychology movement, his first book was called Authentic Happiness. And then he evolved and changed that to flourish, which is a more accurate translation of this word, eudaimonia. To flourish doesn't mean you're always happy, face, big old grin, smiling all the time. But it means you're striving to express the best within you, moment to moment to moment. Then you are, as you successfully do that, a eudaimon and you experience eudaimonia. That's the ultimate end that we're all after the summum bonum again. How do we achieve that? How do we become a eudaimon? Well, Aristotle tells us via what he calls virtuous activity of the soul. You want to experience yudaimoni, you want to experience that deep sense of joy and flourishing. Well then live with virtue. Of course, the ancient word that he used for virtue, excellence, was arete. And I've said many times that if I had to summarize my entire philosophy in one word, it would be that word arete, which again means to live with virtue. But it's something closer to expressing the best version of yourself moment to moment to moment. So if this is what you're capable of and that's what you're actually doing, there's a gap between who you're capable of being in a moment and what you're actually being in. That gap is where we're going to find anxiety, regret, depression, close the gap, live with virtue, virtuous activity of the soul, as Aristotle describes it in this ethics, what are you going to experience? You're going to experience joy in a sense of flourishing, in a sense of eudaimonia. Eudaimon, good soul. The way I've been describing it in our plus ones and other contexts is you want to high five your inner soul, that part of you that's always there, that's whispering in your ear, you're capable of this right now, in this moment, when you pay attention to that voice and you have fun high fiving your inner daimon. You have a good daimon, a good soul. You are a yudaimon. You, you are living in integrity with that highest version of yourself, virtuous activity of the soul. In a word, arete. Moving on. The Olympics, fun historical fact, were formed in 776 BC in Olympia, not too far from Athens. Aristotle uses the Olympics as a metaphor and he says, look, when you go to the Olympic Games, who's awarded the prize, right? Is it the one who looks the best? Like pre competition, you know that everyone just shows up and the judges look at him and go, wow, you really look the best. You look like you kind of know what you're doing. He says, no, the prize goes to the one who's in the arena, who's competing, who's in action. And he says, so it is with life. You can't just know these ideas. You can't just talk about these ideas. You've got to actually put them into action, right? And then you need to put them into action consistently. He says, one swallow does not make a summer. One virtuous act does not make a eudaimon. You need to string together a series of these virtuous acts consistently over an extended period of time. And then you get to experience the joy of living in integrity with virtuous activity of the soul. But again, remember the Olympics, if all you're doing is thinking about these ideas and talking about the ideas and expecting to be awarded a prize, good luck with that. Not how it works. The fourth big idea here is the doctrine of the mean. So my hunch is you've heard of the mean at this stage, right? So Aristotle says virtue is again, in accordance, virtuous activity of the soul is what we want to aim for. He says virtue has a vice of deficiency and a vice of excess. So virtue is right there, right at the mean, not too much, not too little. And he walks us through in this book a ton of different virtues, right? And he kind of puts them all through this equation. So courage is his number one virtue. It's the one that he focuses on first. As we've talked about in other contexts, the word courage comes from the Latin word for heart. So just as your heart vitalizes your arms and legs and all your other organs, courage is the virtue that vitalizes all the other virtues. Without courage to live in integrity with these ideas, then they're just ideas, right? You need to put them into action when it's hard to put them into action. That's the whole point. He says, if you feel fear and you take no action, then you have a vice of deficiency. You're a coward. Now, if you never feel fear, he says, that's not a virtue that leads to rash behavior. The virtue is right in the middle. It's right in that the mean, which is where we come up with the doctrine of the mean. You can throw anything into that equation. But another important Point that he makes is we each have different tendencies, right? So some of us tend to fall a little bit too far this way, or we tend to fall a little bit too far the other way. He says, you need to correct yourself. You need to know yourself well enough to know where your tendency lies. And it's really, really hard to hit the virtuous mean. And you need to kind of bend yourself the same way you straighten wood. You need to bend yourself the other way. If you tend to lean too far this way, know that lean this way and vice versa. Of course, find the virtuous meaning again, that's not a one once and done kind of thing. That's a constant iterating process. Moment to moment to moment. You're either going to step forward into growth, express the best version of yourself, high five your inner daimon, or not. We want to get good at practicing that. And then our final idea here is magnanimity. This is one of the virtues that he profiles. I just find it absolutely beautiful. So we're going to wrap up on this one. The absurdity of trying to Capture Aristotle in 10, 15 minutes is not lost on me, but having fun. So magnanimity literally means magna magnum animus. Great soul. Great soul is one of his virtues. And again he throws that into his doctrine of the mean. You can have a great soul or you can have a very small soul, which is pusillanimous. Pusillanimity, Tongue twister. You can be pusillanimous, or you can be magnanimous, or you can be conceited. And the way he describes it is that a person with a great soul to be magnanimous is to have a very high sense of what you're capable of, to know that you can do great things and then to actually do it. Now you're conceited if you think you can do great things, but you really can't. You're really not willing to do the work to actually do that. But then he says, and of course, we want to be grounded and humble and all those things and make sure we aren't being conceited and overestimating our potential. But then he says, you need to be aware of the other side of the equation. The vice of deficiency is you actually are capable of doing great things, but you don't see it. You don't value yourself enough, so you don't actually go out and strive to do those great things. He says, you need to be aware of that. And that's actually worse than the other side of it because you could have done great things, but instead you're pusillanimous. When I read the book, this is a section that just jumped out at me. I was excited to share. Think about what you're capable of. Think about you again as your best self, the optimist. Which, again, as we've discussed, means the best. The optimist version of you, in my mind, is great. Period. There's a divine potential within all of us that will be expressed uniquely by each of us. But what is that best version of you look like? Start living in integrity with it. See that you're capable of more than you're probably giving yourself credit for. And then go out and show up with the greatness of soul that Aristotle looks at as one of the most chief virtues. Another fun fact here. Gandhi, Mahatma. You know what Mahatma literally means? It means great soul. Mahatma, magnanimous. We want to unleash that greatness within each of us. Live with magnanimity. Be the best version of ourselves again. See that? See what might be getting in the way for you and how you can close that gap as you live at that virtuous mean, knowing that you need to bend yourself the other way if you tend to fall one way or another between a vice of deficiency and a vice of excess. Imagine you're straightening wood as you get yourself all straightened up. Then we've got the Olympics. Not too long before Aristotle started rocking, in Athens and Olympia, we had these competitors. They were not awarded because they looked good. They were rewarded because they actually competed well. So it is with us. How do we compete? Well, virtuous activity of the soul. Have I mentioned that? In a word, arete express the best version of yourself. When have I mentioned moment to moment to moment. And then what do we experience? Eudaimonia. A good soul. We become eudaimons. We become exemplars of what virtue in action looks like. Ultimately, that's the essence of all of our work together. How do we give our greatest gifts in greatest service to the world in a time when we need that more than ever? Let's be you daimons and you die womones. All right, there you go. Nickomackian ethics. Hope you enjoyed. What was your favorite big idea that jumped out and landed? How can you put it into a more embodied, integrated part of your life? Starting today, get out there, win some Olympic medals by showing up and being your best self. Moment to moment. Moment. Make today another awesome day. See you.