Aristotle – Page 6 – Achilles & Aristotle

Poetic Licence

The experience of rapidly tapping out some words (‘School Run’ below), to manage my stress and frustration at my son not getting out of the car this Thursday morning, was an interesting one.

There’s something about tapping an iPhone screen and conjuring a few words of rhyme which both soothes and fulfils. So I did another on ‘spelling’ on Friday morning:

Spelling test
Practice quest
Raised tempers
Points incentives
Distraction reigns
Grumps
Everyone’s cross
What have we lernd
Very little

‘Awayday’ (below) tumbled out last night and I find myself unexpectedly enjoying churning out poetry instead of prose for a change. Perhaps it’s the influence of Twitter. Saying more in less distills your words. Overnight I got a cheerful ‘like’ and a nice comment to encourage me along.

As so often in recent times I have Aristotle to thank. He says the job of the poet is to say something transcendent and universal about the human condition, in no more or less words than are needed. I find this strangely liberating. It doesn’t matter if it’s perfect, scans or rhymes. The job is done if it says something which chimes.

Banal is meaningful if it triggers a memory or a moment of empathy. I read in the New Scientist this week that life passes more quickly as we get older because our senses are no longer constantly alight with new experiences – we’ve seen it all before. The challenge then is to keep finding ways to bring life to life. So I’ve recorded my morning for my own pleasure and future recollection. Aristotle gives us all poetic licence, which is good for the mind and the soul.

Post office sorting
A Saturday routine
Too large for your letterbox
Sorry you weren’t in
Stand in line
For modern life’s Aladdin’s cave
Got any ID for that
Then
Cardboard boxes and sealed bags
Reveal
New household treasure
To carry off
In triumph
Home

Bacon sandwich
Warm baguette
Irish rasher
Ketchup lash
Then
Focused eating
Greasy plate
The only trace

Sun’s rays
Happy days
In the park
The children lark
Throwing and catching
Tearing around
Shouts of delight
Ball goes to hand
Ball goes to ground
Swings, bumps and bikes
Life is easy
Sometimes

Aristotle, Ethics, Life, Philosophy, Psychology, Work

Crystallisation

At the core of Aristotle’s account of ethics and virtue is ‘Prohairesis’ – the central moral character.

I increasingly think of it like a copper sulphate crystal growing on a piece of thread. When you do the classic school experiment, knotted threads provide the core around which a copper sulphate crystal can form, from a saturated solution. But you often get several smaller crystals and imperfections in the main one.

In my thesis, the central moral character forms – like a copper sulphate crystal – when choice and actions start to cohere around a central narrative of who we are and what we stand for. The sub-crystals are alternate versions of ourselves and the imperfections are just that – out of character behaviours, foibles and failings.

Last week I gave a talk where I owned up to once having ‘presentational positions’ on most aspects of work. They were largely free floating from any common ethical foundation. I had ethics ‘in the mix’, but no core crystal.

Expedience, presentational benefit and plausible deniability were as likely to inform my public utterances as beliefs, values or virtue. Not these days. I have Prohairesis – a central moral character which, on my better days, informs and guides my choices.

But to meet Aquinas’s test of virtue I have one major challenge left – slowing down. Talking to a friend at the weekend it transpires that one of the strengths of ‘clever’ people is they are quick. This means they can quickly weigh options and decide on the best action. But the challenge to ‘capable’ people as they progress in life, and into more complicated situations, is to use this processing capability to judge more wisely – not more quickly.

Aquinas has it that a man can make ‘good’ or ‘bad’ moral choices without any guiding core moral character, but they cannot be truly ‘virtuous’ without ‘Prudentia’ – practical wisdom – as the unifying prism. As Herbert McCabe says deliberation should be long and considered, action sharp and decisive. Sometimes I am too quick to decide.

I have Prohairesis forming in a nice crystal on the thread of my life. I’m not bad on Prudentia these days either. But like copper sulphate crystals these things take time to grow, so I should take my time too.

Aristotle, Language, Life, Philosophy, Psychology

Language

Re-reading a chapter of Herbert McCabe’s ‘On Aquinas’ last night, the outline of a new understanding emerged from the complex conceptual haze of the ‘philosophy of language’.

Language is the means through which we transcend individual experience and share our lives, ideas and culture with others. So far so obvious – Stephen Hawking’s is a brilliant mind but without a twitch sensor and a computer voice he’d be lost to us, alone trapped in his own head.

McCabe, following Aquinas and Wittgenstein considers language as exclusively ‘public’. It exists outside and apart from the sense perceptions of people – it has to otherwise it would not work as a means of sharing understanding.

So while my ‘red’ might look and feel different to yours (although probably not that much) as soon as we name it, it ceases to be my ‘property’ and becomes a shared one. As McCabe points out, my sense perceptions are my own, but my words ‘belong’ to the English language and are public, shared and ‘intersubjective’ – i.e. most people would agree on what they mean, otherwise they wouldn’t work.

Why is this so important? Well as Aristotle said: ‘It us the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it’.

Similarly it is the mark of an animal with language to be able to describe, contemplate and imagine actions, not simply to feel, jump and act. Without language there is no reflection, just action and reaction.

For Aristotle, Aquinas, Wittgenstein and McCabe, language is not just a fancy tail feather or ornament on human intellect – it is human intellect. Language is the difference between pure instinct and intelligence, communication and culture.

The penny has dropped for me – something I didn’t ‘get’ when I did philosophy at University. David Hume and others persuaded me that sensations come first and language just describes them. But I now reckon it’s the other way around – language marks off and frames sensations so we can contemplate them. Language is not just communicating, it’s everything.

Language also connects us across boundaries of space and time. Herbert McCabe lives on through his limpid, lively philosophical prose. Like Montaigne, you feel you know the man when you read what McCabe has written. Shrewd, perhaps a little stubborn, quick-witted, sharp – and for a monk, disarmingly worldly and funny.

As Aristotle said, we are we repeatedly do. Perhaps, also, we are what we repeatedly write – poetry, prose or philosophy.

Aristotle, Ethics, Philosophy, Psychology

Shame There

Does seeing cruelty make us more or less likely to engage in it? Catalunya has just banned bullfights. But I saw one in Colombia nearly 20 years ago and felt I could see the nobility in it which Hemingway describes in ‘Death in the afternoon’.

Montaigne though thinks cruelty to animals does desensitise us:

Those natures that are sanguinary towards beasts discover a natural proneness to cruelty. After they had accustomed themselves at Rome to spectacles of the slaughter of animals, they proceeded to those of the slaughter of men, of gladiators.

He also points out Karma was alive and kicking in Roman France:

The religion of our ancient Gauls maintained that souls, being eternal, never ceased to remove and shift their places from one body to another; mixing moreover with this fancy some consideration of divine justice, they said that God assigned it another body to inhabit, more or less painful, and proper for its condition:

If it had been valiant, he lodged it in the body of a lion; if voluptuous, in that of a hog; if timorous, in that of a hart or hare; if malicious, in that of a fox, and so of the rest, till having purified it by this chastisement, it again entered into the body of some other man.

But if we think animals deserve our humanity, only, to keep in check our brutality to each other, the story of Koko the Gorilla suggests they are well able to judge us too.

Koko, a 40 year old female Gorilla has mastered the American Sign Language for 2000 words. But like the Border Collie which has learnt the name of 4000 stuffed toys, it’s easy to dismiss this as trial and error ‘behaviourism’ – action for reward with nothing ‘thought’ in between.

The story told by the scientist who oversees Koko suggests differently:

“It happened by accident – someone sent a DVD about primates and I didn’t really look at it, but it was playing when I looked and saw Koko watching a graphic bushmeat scene. I hadn’t previewed it like I should have. The next day Koko picked up an insert from a newspaper and it was a supermarket ad. She held up a section full of pictures of meat and signed “Shame there.”

So simple, but so powerful as a summary of what we’re capable of. As Aristotle said we are the best and worst of animals.

Aristotle, Ethics, Life, Philosophy, Truisms, Work

Veni, Vidi, Amici

As I get on in life, I get to spend time with some interesting, clever people. But they can come with sizeable egos. And that can translate into ‘High Status Behaviours’.

That’s not necessarily a problem. ‘Happy High Status’ is feeling good enough about yourself that you can feel relaxed and good about the success and contribution of others. But not everyone manages to keep the ‘Happy’ in High Status.

The alternative is less attractive – being so concerned with your own status that you need everyone else to recognise it. Or worse, to knock down others to assert it. I wonder if there’s a Greek term for that? Narcissism is one.

But whatever you call it, loneliness seems to me to be an inevitable by-product. I think dominant High Status behaviours are completely missing the point of life.

For Aristotle, that central point is to attract and nurture better friends. Friends care for our virtue and excellence, as we care for theirs. The best of friends are the means and end of it all.

But, as Aristotle said:

No one loves the man whom he fears.

He who hath many friends hath none.

No one would choose a friendless existence on condition of having all the other things in the world.

So why do smart, successful, powerful people sometimes behave in ways that seem to get in the way of true friendship?

Seeking power, wealth and acolytes has always been a primal driver. And on the face of it, it helps not to be too sentimental. But an instrumental view of others – that they are means to your end, hammers useful only as long as there is a nail – is missing the point I feel. As Aristotle also said:

My best friend is the man who in wishing me well wishes it for my sake.

Friendship of this type is earned, nurtured and freely given, not bought, demanded or taken. About the best thing in life, I reckon, is true Aristotelian friendship.

A contented ego is a prerequisite, but a conceited, instrumental or selfish one just gets in the way. Friendship, not conquest, is the purpose of the good life.