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Great Thinkers: Simple tools from sixty great thinkers to improve your life today. (The School of Life Library)
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About Great Thinkers: Simple Tools From Sixty Great
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Aristotle (384–322 BC) Aristotle was born around 384 BC in the ancient Greek kingdom of Macedonia, where his father was the royal doctor. He grew up to be arguably the most influential philosopher ever, with modest nicknames like ‘the master’, and simply ‘the philosopher’. One of his big jobs was tutoring Alexander the Great, who soon after went out and conquered the known world. Aristotle studied in Athens, worked with Plato for several years, and then branched out on his own. He founded a research and teaching centre called The Lyceum: French secondary schools, lycées, are named in honour of this venture. He liked to walk about while teaching and discussing ideas. His followers were named Peripatetics, the wanderers. His many books are actually lecture notes. Aristotle was fascinated by how things really work. How does an embryo chick develop in an egg? How do squid reproduce? Why does a plant grow well in one place and hardly at all in another? And, most importantly, what makes a human life and a whole society go well? For Aristotle, philosophy was about practical wisdom. Here are four big philosophical questions he answered: 1. What makes people happy? In the Nicomachean Ethics – the book got its name because it was edited by his son, Nicomachus – Aristotle set himself the task of identifying the factors that lead people to have a good life, or not. He suggested that good and successful people all possess distinct virtues, and proposed that we should get better at identifying what these are, so that we can nurture them in ourselves and honour them in others. Aristotle also observed that every virtue seems to be bang in the middle of two vices. It occupies what he termed ‘the golden mean’ between two extremes of character. For example, in book four of his Ethics, under the charming title of ‘conversational virtues and vices’, Aristotle looks at ways in which people are better or worse at talking to one another – buffoonery, wit, boorishness. Knowing how to have a good conversation is one of the key ingredients of the good life, Aristotle recognised. Some people go wrong because they lack a subtle sense of humour: that’s the bore, ‘someone useless for any kind of social intercourse, because he contributes nothing and takes offence at everything’. But others carry humour to excess: ‘the buffoon cannot resist a joke, sparing neither himself nor anybody else, provided that he can raise a laugh and saying things that a man of taste would never dream of saying’. So the virtuous person is in the golden mean in this area: witty but tactful. In a fascinating survey of personality and behaviour, Aristotle analyses ‘too little’, ‘too much’ and ‘just right’ around a whole host of virtues. We can’t change our behaviour in any of these areas just at the drop of a hat. But change is possible, eventually. Moral goodness, says Aristotle, is the result of habit. It takes time, practice, encouragement. So Aristotle thinks people who lack virtue should be understood as unfortunate, rather than wicked. What they need isn’t scolding or being thrown into prison, but better teachers and more guidance. 2. What is art for? The blockbuster art at the time was tragedy. Athenians watched gory plays at community festivals held at huge open-air theatres. Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles were household names. Aristotle wrote a how-to-write-great-plays manual, The Poetics. It’s packed with great tips: for example, make sure to use peripeteia, a change in fortune, when, for the hero, things go from great to awful. And anagnorisis, the moment of dramatic revelation, when suddenly the hero realises their life is going very wrong – and is, in fact, a catastrophe. But what is tragedy actually for? What is the point of a whole community coming together to watch horrible things happening to lead characters? Like Oedipus, in the play by Sophocles, who by accident kills his father, gets married to his
