Aristotle as Self-Help Guru
Also: The complete diaries of Virginia Woolf, confessions of Europe’s most successful art thief, and more.
The first thing that comes through in Nikhil Krishnan’s review of Susan Sauvé Meyer’s new translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, which has been abridged and retitled How to Flourish: An Ancient Guide to Living Well, is just how much has been cut from the original text:
And virtue, his central category, gets defined—in a line that Meyer’s abridgment culls—in terms that look suspiciously circular. Virtue is a state “consisting in a mean,” Aristotle maintains, and this mean “is defined by reference to reason, that is to say, to the reason by reference to which the prudent person would define it.” (For Aristotle, the “mean” represented a point between opposite excesses—for instance, between cowardice and recklessness lay courage.) The phrase “prudent person” here renders the Greek phronimos, a person possessed of that special quality of mind which Aristotle called “phronesis.” But is Aristotle then saying that virtue consists in being disposed to act as the virtuous person does? That sounds true, but trivially so.
Of course, Aristotle’s definition of virtue is not circular. One of his key points is that virtue is not a thing—an object—but a mode. I wonder, though, if Meyer also left out the famous passage in the same section where Aristotle makes this clear. An attitude is virtuous, he writes, if it is felt “at the right times, with reference to the right objects, towards the right people, with the right motive, and in the right way” (emphasis mine)?
Meyer also apparently cut another key passage from Aristotle’s text: the one where he notes that our upbringing largely determines whether we will be virtuous or not—since virtue comes from practice. Here’s Krishnan:
Treated as a serious request for advice, the question of how to flourish could receive a gloomy answer from Aristotle: it may be too late to start trying. Why is that? Flourishing involves, among other things, performing actions that manifest virtues, which are qualities of character that enable us to perform what Aristotle calls our “characteristic activity” (as Meyer renders the Greek ergon, a word more commonly, but riskily, translated as “function”). But how do we come to acquire these qualities of character, or what Meyer translates as “dispositions”? Aristotle answers, “From our regular practice.”
In a passage missing from Meyer’s ruthless abridgment, Aristotle warns, “We need to have been brought up in noble habits if we are to be adequate students of noble and just things. . . . For we begin from the that; if this is apparent enough to us, we can begin without also knowing why. Someone who is well brought up has the beginnings, or can easily acquire them.” “The that,” a characteristically laconic formulation of Aristotle’s, is generally taken to refer to the commonsense maxims that a passably well-parented child hears about not lying, fighting, or talking with food in one’s mouth.
Krishnan identifies a few other key passages that were cut and goes to write that Nicomachean Ethics is no self-help book—at least not in the modern sense—but it is a book that we desperately need today, unabridged:
We have long lived in a world desperate for formulas, simple answers to the simple question “What should I do?” Some of my contemporaries in graduate school, pioneers in what was then a radical new movement called “effective altruism,” devised an online career-planning tool to guide undergraduates in their choice of careers. (It saw a future for me in computer science.) I’ve had bemusing conversations with teen-age boys in thrall to Andrew Tate, a muscled influencer who has as many as forty-one “tenets.” My in-box is seldom without yet another invitation to complete an online course on the fine-grained etiquette of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” (Certificate awarded upon completion of multiple-choice test.)
But the algorithms, the tenets, the certificates are all attempts to solve the problem—which is everybody’s problem—of how not to be an asshole. Life would be a lot easier if there were rules, algorithms, and life hacks solving that problem once and for all. There aren’t. At the heart of the Nicomachean Ethics is a claim that remains both edifying and chastening: phronesis doesn’t come that easy.
Amen to that.
In other news, did poetry anthologies “make” British “culture”? That’s a clunky question, I know, but I am taking if from the subtitle of Clare Bucknell’s new book, The Treasuries: Poetry Anthologies and the Making of British Culture. Robert Crawford reviews it in the latest issue of the London Review of Books: “At the heart of Bucknell’s book is an examination of Francis Turner Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language (1861), which Ezra Pound denounced three-quarters of a century later as a ‘stinking sugar teat’, but which sold very well from the outset and, as Bucknell points out, ‘became a model for the heavyweight collections that came after it, household fixtures such as The Oxford Book of English Verse (1900) and The Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936)’. In his 1991 edition of The Golden Treasury, Christopher Ricks called it ‘the best-known and the best-selling anthology of English poetry ever’, adding: ‘It is the best, too.’ Bucknell contends that Palgrave’s anthology was ‘as British as the poetic landscapes between its covers’, which included those of Shakespeare, Thomas Gray, Wordsworth and the Border ballads. But it was British in a determinedly monolingual way (Palgrave even worried about including Burns’s Scottish dialect). He included nothing medieval (none of his poets was born before the 1550s), and, after a minor tussle with Tennyson, excluded anyone who was still alive in 1861.”
Andrew Stuttaford reviews Ian Buruma’s The Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II: “The Collaborators, the dark, engrossing, and occasionally brilliant new book by the Dutch writer Ian Buruma is not about collaboration—at least not in the way it’s implied in the book’s subtitle. Not really. To be sure, a good portion of its narrative unfolds in countries or territories under foreign occupation during the Second World War (or its Asian preamble), societies reset where new rules had, as well as new rulers, replaced the old, creating undeserved opportunities for, or forcing unwanted choices on, those who lived in them. Buruma draws up a taxonomy of the types of collaborator and touches on the reasons they behaved in the way they did. Some were on the make, others were ideologues, still others told themselves they were the lesser evil, and the list goes on.”
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