In an interview on Virtue

The Nichomachean Ethics was written at the same time, wasn’t it?

A little later. Aristotle was Plato’s most famous student. It’s not nearly as readable as the Symposium: it’s dense and obscure in places and you really do have to struggle with it, but it is a sophisticated and subtle analysis of the various virtues: courage, temperance, and wisdom among many others. It’s incredibly subtle and precise, especially when you compare it with the way a lot of moral words are used today.

I was struck by Aristotle’s description of courage in particular. The word as it’s used today by journalists and politicians has almost no meaning at all. People will say that some writer who wrote a very revelatory book about his son’s drug addiction showed incredible courage, or that someone who stands in the middle of Trafalgar Square and masturbates as part of some artistic performance shows real courage. And suicide bombers are “cowards”, which is precisely the one thing they are not. We use the words “cowardly” and “courageous” very loosely: really just to express the fact that we approve or disapprove of something. Whereas Aristotle shows you that you can really think very precisely about courage and what it means. He says courage is overcoming fear of something. Not just fear of anything: there are some things which you should feel fear about, like disgrace – so someone who overcomes their fear of disgrace is not being courageous, they’re just being shameless.

Aristotle also talks about the virtues as being means between extremes. So wit is a mean between the vice of deficiency, which is boorishness, and the vice of excess, which is buffoonery. Most modern moral philosophers would think that there’s nothing really to be said about wit: it’s just a matter of subjective opinion or preference, not something you can analyse or discuss rationally. But Aristotle shows that you can say quite a lot about it that is really plausible and persuasive.

In an interview on Being Good

Let’s begin on your book selection with Aristotle, the daddy of ethics, or one of them at least. In his Nichomachean Ethics, he poses the Socratic question of how to live best.

It was of course Socrates who challenged his time, and has challenged us all, with the great question: What sort of people should we be? How should we live? And by implication, what kind of society is the right kind to ensure that individual flourishing can occur? That question which Socrates asked was not hijacked but was at least developed by Plato into a set of views that we might not agree with because they’re a bit too idealistic. Also, the society that he envisaged as a setting for the good life is a bit too much like fascism for most of our tastes now.

But Aristotle, who is a more down-to-earth character, has a much more realistic grasp of what is possible for human beings to do. He said the great question is how we should live well, so that we live a good life, and he came up with a very positive response – which is to say that what distinguishes us from the rest of the world is our possession of reason. It’s in the application of reason to circumstance that we do our best. So if we navigate our way through situations where we’re obliged to make certain sorts of choices or respond in certain ways, using our reason, then we will in general be expressing the virtues.

For example, you find yourself in a situation where courage is called for. What is courage, in that situation? Well, it is the middle path between rashness on the one hand and cowardice on the other. Or suppose you’re asked to be generous? What’s that? In the circumstances, it is not being mean and not being profligate, but something in between. People have said this sounds like a middle class, middle aged, middle brow approach to the virtuous life, but in a way it isn’t because [Aristotle] was very conscious of the fact that circumstances differ, our capacity to respond to them differs from individual to individual, and therefore the real expression of a moral life is this serious, sincere endeavour to do the best in your circumstances.

He identifies four all-encompassing qualities of being a virtuous character, from being a great soul to being a good friend.

Indeed, friendship is a very important thing for Aristotle, and perhaps one of the most beautiful things in the Nichomachean Ethics is his discussion of friendship. That discussion may push the concept of friendship just that little bit too far, because he says we must treat a friend as another self, so we identify our friend’s interests with our own. That seems to fly in the face of the thought that we should give our friends some space, recognise their individuality and not make too many demands on them to be like us. So you could have a conversation with Aristotle – and I think all great ethical works are ones that we can have a conversation with.

But he’s dead right that if we become friends with our children as they grow up, become friends with our parents as we grow up, become friends with our lovers or spouses, our comrades, our colleagues, then even if they remain those things – if your lover remains your lover, but you become a friend with him or her – that is a human achievement of the very highest order. He’s right about that, and it sets us a worthy goal.

He also talked, as you point out, about magnanimity. There is a wonderful expression in the ancient Greek – the “megalopsychos”, which sounds like something certifiable but it just means magna anima [great soul], from which we get our word “magnanimity”. The magnanimous person, the great souled person, is a person of generosity and sympathy. I think this is very beautiful, and underlies almost all humanist ethics – the idea that we premise our engagement with other people on the most generous and sympathetic understanding we can have of human nature and the human condition. That we make allowances for being human. The Greeks have this marvellous idea, so different from the theological moralities where sin is a stain on your soul which you have to work hard to scrub off, and perhaps never quite get rid of. The Greek conception is what they called hamartia, which is the mistaken shot. You shoot your arrow at the target – if you miss, what do you do? You take better aim next time.

The academic Ronna Burger said of the Ethics that “the end we are seeking is what we have been doing”. That echoes something you were saying earlier. In short, that the end we seek is the means through which we seek it.

Indeed. That’s a very good way of putting it. The well lived life is the well lived life. The well living of life is what it is to live life well. The quest of the good is itself good. This idea is I think a tremendously important one, that one can easily demonstrate by saying: The reason why you admire your friends is not because of what they’ve achieved, but because of what you know they would sincerely like to achieve. We know that if we were to measure the value of a human life only by its successes, then there would be very little value in the world. But we ought to value, and I think do value, people in terms of what they authentically are trying to do and to be. And it’s that endeavour which is the serious thing.