Aristotle – Page 8 – Achilles & Aristotle

London’s Burning

As a red London bus burns a few hundred yards from our house, it’s one of those moments when you stop and think, ‘Did I get this very wrong?’

We have always taken the view that the ‘cheek by jowl’ nature of urban London was worth the aggro. It’s vivid, lively, mixed – at times a bit edgy but alive. And nice ‘people like us’ live dotted all around.

But people who are not like us live all around too. And when it all goes up in smoke and dead eyed teenagers smash up your high street, it makes you think.

In Aristotle’s day another city state or a neighbouring tyrant could violently disturb your contemplation. In Montaigne’s, frequent bouts of plague and civil war.

A few boarded up shop fronts and burnt out buildings is hardly a siege and sacking or a street by street pogrom. But still. It feels bad. I’ve been anxious today. For my kids, for my other half, our house and our safety. We are always but a few authority figures away from mindless violence, a few laws from anarchy.

Ordinary decent people are feeling it too. I’ve seen several almost exaggerated acts of courtesy and consideration between people of all colours and classes on my way to and from work. Pausing to let each other pass, small acknowledgements and hesitant smiles. In these acts people are trying to say “It’s ok, we’re ok.” Post it notes on a boarded up shop eulogise our area and criticise the yobs. A volunteer army came out armed only with brooms to clean up.

It’s finely poised in London today. As Aristotle said man is both the best and worst of animals.

Aristotle, Ethics, Language, Life, Philosophy, Poetry, Politics, Psychology, Work

Rhetoric

I’ve been doing a lot of presentations on strategy in the last few weeks. The good news is people say it’s all very clear. They like it. “A lot better than it was too” some say. I acknowledge, slightly wistfully, that our old strategy was bigger on soaring rhetoric – and I miss that a bit. But not much. Clear and credible is better.

Reading Montaigne and Aristotle on Rhetoric I can see why. Montaigne first:

Eloquence most flourished at Rome when the public affairs were in the worst condition and most disquieted with intestine commotions; as a free and untilled soil bears the worst weeds.

Oh dear – suggests I may have been part of indigestion in our organisational intestines. Our rich intellectual soil allowed many rhetorical flowers to bloom. Perhaps some tilling was called for.

Aristotle for his part, in his encyclopaedic and comprehensive way, offers three volumes on Rhetoric covering it’s function, forms and stylistic niceties.

A dense but magisterial account on the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy runs through Aristotle’s work. In essence the purpose of rhetoric is to persuade. It is neutral and can be used well or badly and for good or for ill. The Rhetorician, like the physician should be judged, not, on whether he or she saves every patient or wins every argument, but on his or her use of the relevant tools, interventions and skills.

The Stanford encyclopaedia offers that persuasion itself depends on (a) the character of the speaker (b) the emotional state of the hearer (c) in the argument (logos) itself. The speaker can employ his or her skills as a stimulus for the sought emotion (pathos) from an audience. However, along with pathos, the speaker must also exhibit ethos, which for Aristotle encompasses wisdom (phronesis), virtue (arete), and good will (eunoia).

Persuasion is accomplished whenever the speech is recieved in such a way as to render the speaker worthy of credence. If the speaker appears to be credible, the audience will form the second-order judgment that propositions put forward by the credible speaker are true or acceptable. The catch is for it to be true Rhetoric the speaker must accomplish these effects by what he or she says; it is not necessary that he is actually virtuous: on the contrary, a preexisting good character cannot be counted part of the technical means of persuasion.

So is Rhetoric mainly about cheating and what you can get away with? And if so why would a man of Aristotle’s leanings engage with it? Well as the Stanford Encyclopaedia explains it:

It could be objected that rhetoric is only useful for those who want to outwit their audience and conceal their real aims, since someone who just wants to communicate the truth could be straightforward and would not need rhetorical tools. This, however, is not Aristotle’s point of view: even those who just try to establish what is just and true need the help of rhetoric when they are faced with a public audience.

Aristotle tells us that it is impossible to teach such an audience, even if the speaker had the most exact knowledge of the subject. The audience of a public speech consists of ordinary people who are not able to follow an exact proof based on the principles of a science. Further, such an audience can easily be distracted by factors that do not pertain to the subject at all; sometimes they are receptive to flattery or just try to increase their own advantage. And this situation becomes even worse if the constitution, the laws, and the rhetorical habits in a city are bad (as in Montaigne’s Rome above).

Finally, most of the topics that are usually discussed in public speeches do not allow of exact knowledge, but leave room for doubt; especially in such cases it is important that the speaker seems to be a credible person and that the audience is in a sympathetic mood. For all those reasons, affecting the decisions of juries and assemblies is a matter of persuasiveness, not of knowledge.

But, reassuringly, at the heart of Aristotle’s approach to rhetoric – as you would expect of the man – is a belief in substance over style:

Aristotle joins Plato in criticizing contemporary manuals of rhetoric. Previous theorists of rhetoric gave most of their attention to methods outside the subject; they taught how to slander, how to arouse emotions in the audience, or how to distract the attention of the hearers from the subject.

Aristotelian rhetoric is different in that it is centred on a rhetorical kind of proof, the ‘enthymeme’ which he called the most important means of persuasion. Since people are most strongly convinced when they suppose that something has been proven, there is no need for the orator to confuse or distract the audience by the use of emotional appeals, etc.

In Aristotle’s view an orator will be even more successful when he just picks up the convincing aspects of a given issue, thereby using commonly-held opinions as premises. Since people have a natural disposition for the true there is no unbridgeable gap between commonly-held opinions and what is true.

For Aristotle, the speaker does need to recognise that his or her audience may not have the habit of scientific proofs. He also concedes that long chains of logical inferences might not work well either. But, in his view, every man is open to bridging the gap between commonly-held opinions and the truth. So good rhetoric draws on both.

As for style, as with his ethics it’s all about the ‘golden mean’. In a nutshell for Aristotle the good style is ‘clear in a way that is neither too banal nor too dignified, but appropriate’. Nice.

I conclude the reasons I need less rhetoric these days is 1) our organisational intestines are in better order 2) more of what we are doing accords with commonly-held beliefs and thus 3) I need far fewer appeals to emotion and long chains of inferences to make my case. All that’s left is to add a spot of Ethos and Pathos and the job is done. Time for a rhetorical rest.

Achilles, Aristotle, Life, Philosophy, Work

Cathedral or Cave

I imagine Aristotle, like the Acropolis, as more Cathedral. The reclusive poet Emily Dickinson would be more cave. Montaigne, perhaps old Paris; earthy rumbustious streets and deep reflective catacombs.

I’ve been toying with Nietzsche’s idea that our ‘will to power’ is either expressed in the real world or forcibly turned in. For him, we create a complex inner life in proportion to the scale of our drive we cannot express externally.

It’s an interesting thought. Complex interesting people tend to have a good deal of both – rich inner lives and fulfilling outer ones. But not always. Nietzsche credits civilisation with curbing the capacity to express our animal instincts externally – driving them inwards. This unexpressed energy drives our inner lives – our conscience, guilt and creativity.

I think regularly about the balance of inner and external. I don’t feel I have the ‘will to power’ for a full ‘Cathedral’ in the external world. Too much competition, conflict, one-upmanship and strife in seeking grandeur. I fear I’d lose my health, precious time with my family and my happiness if I allowed a ‘grand projet’ or personal aggrandisement to consume me.

Talking to a friend – who is a decade older than me – this week, I felt a bit guilty. He has real fire in his belly for systemic reform, transformational change and the great debates of public policy. I said I’m just not attracted to any of that right now.

We talked about using your talents and our responsibility to improve the lot of others. He started his career as a lone residential social worker, on a tough housing estate. Beer bottles bounced off the cage that surrounded his outpost all night. That’s where his fire still comes from. It drives him to want to improve the scaffolding and superstructure of the nation’s health and social care system.

I don’t have that. I’m more a family chapel with a good sized intellectual cellar. My projects are more local and small scale – my family, the people around me. But never say never. The world is an unpredictable place. Gaudi started with lampposts and squat schoolhouses, so I suppose you never really know what you might build one brick at a time.

Aristotle, Death, Life

Servan-Schreiber

I was sad to read today that David Servan-Schrieber lost his battle against cancer the other day. But although he lost the battle, I think he won the war. He lived nearly twenty full and vivid years post diagnosis of a brain tumour. His cancer spurred him to develop as a human being and to write. Reading his books and fearing the big ‘C’ did the same for me.

His writing combined a rock solid scientific foundation with an interest in the whole person. As someone wrote in an obituary, he was tete, coeur et corps – head, heart and body. All I have to say is read his books: ‘Healing without Freud or Prozac’ for the head and the heart and ‘Anticancer’ for the body.

A good man, who it is tempting to say died too young. But reading about his full medical, research, writing, speaking, travelling and sporting life, perhaps at 50 he managed as Aristotle recommends: ‘to rise from life as from a banquet, neither thirsty nor drunken.’ I hope so.

Aristotle, Ethics, Life, Philosophy

Bonhoeffer

I quoted Dietrich Bonhoeffer to a friend the other day. Bonhoeffer stood up to the Nazis and perished for it in a concentration camp. He is celebrated (pictured on the right) as a 20th Century martyr in Westmister Abbey.

A Christian theologian and a man of obvious moral courage, Bonhoeffer argued – like Kierkegaard before him – for a more direct spiritual connection with God. One mediated by fewer trappings of religion.

He believed we have a deep moral sense, beyond the reach of rational thought which is both our guide and goad. He said our conscience comes from a “depth which lies beyond a man’s own will and his own reason and it makes itself heard as the call of human existence to unity with itself.”

For Bonhoeffer, guilt is a warning about our ‘doings’ conflicting with our ‘being’. A guilty conscience arises when we lose the unity – what some people call ‘congruence’. Our conscience is, thus, like an alarm bell, warning us of the risk of damage to ourselves.

I’m not sure I agree with Bonhoeffer that conscience lies beyond the ‘event horizon’ of thought and will. I’m more with Aristotle that we simply ‘are what we repeatedly do’. For me, reason, will, our actions and character all come together in an intertwined person. But the Bonhoeffer quote I read out today is still a powerful one:

The man with a conscience fights a lonely battle against the overwhelming forces of inescapable situations which demand moral decisions despite the likelihood of adverse consequences.

Bonhoeffer found himself up against truly overwhelming forces and a tragically inescapable situation – it cost him his life. He took moral decisions despite the likelihood, entirely realised, of very adverse consequences. Whether he found it in faith or forged it through reason, that is moral courage.

For Aristotle, courage is the ‘mean’ between confidence and fear. To respond to ‘overwhelming forces of inescapable situations’ with the courage of Bonhoeffer requires a strength built within – the confidence in the importance of ‘unity with oneself’ overcoming the fear of ‘adverse consequences’ and considering them a price worth paying.

But what’s the practical day to day application here? Like the other 20th century martyrs in Westminster Abbey, Bonhoeffer faced extraordinary challenges. History has judged him simply and kindly. Most of us live with less extreme, more attritional moral challenges and choices – do I say something or keep quiet, do I stand up for something or let it go, do I join in talking someone down or keep my mouth shut. And implicit in Bonhoeffer’s words are the fact that others won’t always understand and won’t always judge you kindly.

The thought that conscience is a warning that expedient ‘doings’ might undermine my ‘being’ is a valuable one. It’s less about carrying guilt and more about making choices. It achieves some of what Bonhoeffer would no doubt have wished for us; a simple internaliseable test of our actions.

For me, I think it may be this simple: if I can look others in the eye and myself in the mirror – even amidst the adverse consequences of inescapable situations – I know my ‘self’ is in ok shape. If not my ‘doings’ are damaging my ‘being’.