Much of Life is Hard exists in dialogue with Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher who was Plato’s greatest student. The irony is that none of Aristotle’s dialogues survive. What we have of his work is a compendium of lecture notes—which is more than a shame. The notes are compressed, hard to interpret, painful to read. I quote them sparingly. Meanwhile, Aristotle’s dialogues were praised by Roman orators for their “grace” and “the sweetness of [their] style.”
Aristotle was born into a prosperous family in Stagira, Greece, 384/3 BCE.1 His father died when he was young and he was raised by an uncle, Proxenus, who had married Aristotle’s older sister. We don’t know much about Aristotle’s parents. Near the end of the fourth century BCE, Aristotle was accused by Epicurus of being a waster who squandered his father’s wealth before joining the army, then dropping out to deal drugs. Partly on the basis of this rumour, it’s believed by some that Aristotle’s father, Nicomachus, was a doctor. But the rumour is suspect: since Aristotle objected to hedonism, Epicurus, for one, had reason to regard him as a foe. He is a not an impartial source.
What we can say with confidence is that, around age seventeen, Aristotle was sent to Plato’s Academy in Athens, where he stayed for twenty years. He was Plato’s star pupil, known playfully by a nickname, “noûs,” that means mind or intellect. Aristotle went on to criticize Plato’s philosophy, which led to more gossip. According to the Roman historian Diogenes Laertius, the Platonists would complain that “Aristotle kicked us out, just like colts kick out the mother who gave them birth.”
Aristotle was a polymath, interested in the nuances of astronomy, the causes of the weather, and the movements of snails—along with physics, theology, politics, and more. The philosopher Raymond Geuss described him as “an extroverted biologist … on the model of David Attenborough” who did “a bit of general theorizing on the side.” If that is a caricature, still it has a point. Aristotle immersed himself in the particulars of life.
In 348 BCE, Plato died and Speusippus—not Aristotle—was appointed as the head of the Academy. Aristotle left Athens, eventually arriving in Macedonia, where for several years he had close ties with King Philip, whose son he would teach. The child went on to be Alexander the Great, though Aristotle’s contemporaries seem not to have taken much note of Aristotle’s role in his education.
The truth is that, unlike Socrates and Plato, who were public figures known to everyone, Aristotle was a philosopher’s philosopher, a cloistered intellectual. That didn’t prevent him from running into trouble. He returned to Athens in 335/4 BCE, founded his own school, the Lyceum, and ran it for twelve years. At that point, Alexander died, the political tides in Athens turned, and Aristotle was accused of impiety. Unlike his philosophical grandfather, Socrates, who had been executed for impiety seventy-six years earlier, in 399 BCE, Aristotle fled. “I will not let the Athenians sin a second time against philosophy,” he is said to have proclaimed.
Aristotle died the following year.
I said that I wrote Life is Hard in dialogue with Aristotle and that is true—though the dialogue is sometimes left implicit, and often takes the form of disagreement.
Aristotle made mistakes—some of his worst were about “natural slaves”—but he also got things right. He criticized hedonism, the idea that a good life is simply one of pleasure and the absence of pain. Pleasures and pains, he argued, can be more or less appropriate. It is fitting to take pleasure in a friend’s good fortune; grotesque to celebrate their death. The first contributes to a life well-lived; the second does not.
Aristotle was aware of the limits of proof in ethics, the futility of trying to convince the intransigent sceptic, and the need to attend to the specifics of one’s circumstance in knowing how to live. Thus the Nicomachean Ethics, named for Aristotle’s son, was addressed to decent people like us, not moral monsters, and it emphasized the role of judgement in living well.
When Aristotle asked how we should live, his interest was in human life, not Plato’s “Form of the Good,” a supersensible reality whose nature is independent of us. Conceding that “the Forms have been introduced by friends of our own,” Aristotle spurned them as irrelevant. Since “what is healthy or good is different for men and for fishes,” he wrote, “anyone would say that what is wise is the same but what is practically wise is different.” In other words, while theoretical wisdom—as in logic, mathematics, or physics—is the same for every life-form, practical wisdom is not. If there were rational fish, their ethics would no more align with ours than would their medical science.
Where Aristotle went astray, I think, was in organizing his conception of how to live around the best or ideal life: the life you should choose if you could choose any life at all. Aristotle dreams of a life of leisure, free from every human need. All that is left to do is contemplate, for “this alone would seem to be loved for its own sake [since] nothing arises from it apart from the contemplating, while from practical activities we gain more or less apart from the action.”
Perhaps it’s no surprise that a philosopher of independent means, who complacently defends a slave-holding society, would focus on the life of leisure. Aristotle recommends the path of contemplation without evident concern that it is not available to all or that its being possible for him rests on the sacrifice of others. And he urges us to aim our lives, as they now are, at an impossible ideal. Aristotle thought we should aspire to the life of the gods:
But we must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us; for even if it be small in bulk, much more does it in power and worth surpass everything.
This is terrible advice—like telling protest marcher to relax and read a book. When the world is out of joint, pretending that it isn’t is a recipe for disaster. In Aristotle’s case, it’s a recipe for withdrawal from political life. No wonder he was not a “public intellectual,” or that faced with prosecution, he fled, where Socrates stayed. (I don’t mean to be harsh: I would have done the same myself.)
Despite my debt to his philosophy, Aristotle’s program is the opposite of mine. I begin with the defects of the human condition; he wishes them away. In Dependent Rational Animals, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre notes Aristotle’s misplaced obsession with self-sufficiency. “The question therefore arises,” MacIntyre writes, “what difference to moral philosophy would it make, if we were to treat the facts of vulnerability and affliction and the related facts of dependence as central to the human condition?” That’s the question I take up in Life is Hard.
My account of his life is indebted to Carlo Natali, Aristotle: His Life and School (2013).
I don’t think I realized that the book was already out! Congratulations and I can’t wait to read it, and tell others about it as I’ve done with “Midlife.”
Read Aristotle's response:
https://twitter.com/AristotlesStgra/status/1580570896527343616?s=20&t=1leGGZKcgu-360LKLotPZQ