PhilosophyPodcasts.Org

Oct 15, 2022

An examination of the philosophical themes presented in Aristotle's Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics. Topics include happiness, the voluntary and choice, the doctrine of the mean, particular virtues of character and temperamental means, virtues of thought, akrasia, pleasure, friendship, and luck. Special attention has been paid to Aristotle's treatment of virtues of character and thought and their relation to happiness, the reason why Aristotle is the quintessential virtue ethicist. The virtues of character have not received the attention they deserve in most discussions of the relationship between the two treatises.

Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Happiness
2. Virtue of Character and the Doctrine of the Mean
3. The Voluntary and Choice
4. Virtues of Character and Temperamental Means
5. Justice
6. Virtues of Thought
7. Akrasia and Pleasure
8. Friendship
9. Sophistic Puzzles, the Kaloskagathos, and Luck
10. Happiness Revisited
Conclusion.

Glossary of Key Terms

References

Transcript

Speaker 1:
Hello, and welcome to Philosophy Podcasts, where we interview leading philosophers about their recent work. Today, I am pleased to be speaking with, Professor Paula Gottlieb. She was educated at Oxford and Cornell. She's the author of, The Virtue of Aristotle's Ethics (2009), Aristotle on Thought and Feeling (2021). And the book we'll talk about today is, Aristotle's Ethics, Nicomachean & Eudemian Themes (2022). Those are all Cambridge University press. Paula Gottlieb is Professor of Philosophy and the Affiliate Professor of Classical & Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Welcome, professor.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Thank you. Good to be with you.

Speaker 1:
Thank you. People have for thousands of years turned to Aristotle to help think about how to lead a happy life. I guess, the first question is, it's rhetorical, but if you could address it. One might think, a skeptic might say, "Well, why go back 2000 years? There are plenty of authors who are writing books about how to live your life today." What would be the advantage of going back so far?

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Well, I think that a lot of modern philosophers do go back to Aristotle when they start thinking about happiness. Very often, they use Aristotle to support some more modern view, or they read back some modern views into Aristotle. And I take a different tack about the way we should think about reading ancient philosophers. I don't think, for example, Andrew Melnyk, that all the good bits of Aristotle have already been taken up by later philosophers, so we don't need to look at him anymore.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
I think that there's a lot of interest going on there, and quite often it's things that we may not be still thinking about now, that's of interest. And I certainly take your point, you might wonder, "Why are we reading a dead, white man, who doesn't include women or enslaved people or whatever, in his discussion?" But I think we do look to say, the founding fathers and seeing them sort of interesting or maybe crucial ideas for today, even if they didn't see, I mean, they didn't fully grasp the insights of their own work.

Speaker 1:
Right. Yeah, that's a good point. I was actually going to ask you about that later, but maybe we could go to it now. As we talk later, we'll talk about virtues of character and virtues of thought, and I was kind of wondering what Aristotle's view on that would be. Would he say that to be a great philosopher, a great thinker, you need to be a great man also, or a person, and if you don't, that's a good sign that if there's an inconsistency there, that's a problem?

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Yeah, that's a good question. Well, Aristotle does distinguish sort of theoretical thinking from practical thinking. And on my understanding anyway, he doesn't think that you need a great deal of abstract theoretical thinking in order to be a good person. So I argue for this more in my other books than in the one you're discussing. So somebody who's very good at higher math might be hopeless and have a very happy life, or even would be able to do practical things in their own.

Speaker 1:
Sure.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
One of my favorite cases, a friend of mine who is a famous mathematician, was putting forward very abstract theories, but if we went to a restaurant, he couldn't add up the bill. I mean, that was just in a different world. So I think Aristotle's kind of familiar with that. I guess the question is, how much thinking is necessary in order to be a good person? And this is where give a new translation of phronesis, it's sometimes translated in intelligence or prudent, or practical thinking. The practical thinking is okay, but it sounds as if you've got some theoretical thinking that you're then applying to something else.

Speaker 1:
Right.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
And that's why I use thoughtfulness, because I think at this kind of thinking as a much more sort of hands-on way of thinking about things, being thoughtful rather than having great abstract views about things. I'm trying to think of an example of that, but people who talk a lot about diversity and how important it is, but don't notice there's no diversity in the classes teaching [inaudible 00:06:11].

Speaker 1:
Yes.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
So I think of Aristotle's view as getting away from a more abstract, platonic view, and having a more kind of hands-on view about what it is to be a good person.

Speaker 1:
I'm just thinking out loud here, I wonder if what you're getting at is also what might be called, bad faith, now. When you're thoughtful, you don't have bad faith.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Yes. Well, I guess if you connect bad faith with what the Greeks call, akrasia, that's sort of when you know what the right thing is, but you do something else instead. He does say that the person with thoughtfulness won't be autocratic, which is kind of puzzling to many people. But if you think of akrasia as a kind of bad faith, you're not really quite into the views that you're presenting, or I will put it, they're not sort of integrated properly with your feelings and the rest of your character.

Speaker 1:
Right.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Then yes, I like that idea.

Speaker 1:
I'm going totally out of order here, but you talk about the integration of the virtues of character and the intellectual virtues. At that point, I don't know what your kind of experience of reading this is. When one reads about how to live one's life, you can either be uplifted and inspired or you can either be, "Oh, boy, this is tough. This is a long way off."

Speaker 1:
And normally with Aristotle I find it's uplifting, but when I heard about integrating everything, I thought, "Oh dear, this is difficult." I'm just wondering what your overall attitude towards that is. Do you feel it's inspiring or is it more, "Gee, you've got a long way to go. You're a bad person and you've got a long way to go."

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Yeah. Well, I'd rather it not be something that's a big ideal, because Aristotle says that, I mean, he makes a big deal of the idea that happiness is something achievable in action, and if it's going to be so difficult for people, if it's something sort of more God-like.

Speaker 1:
Right.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Say, Socrates would think of it, "That this is an ideal, but human beings can't really be like that." I don't think that's Aristotle's idea. So I guess in my book on thought and feeling, I try and explain the integration in a way that doesn't sound sort of so outlandish, like you have absolutely no feelings or whatever.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
So one example, this was actually a question, I think Rechinal Kantaker raised this question of, supposing the good person needs to have a blood test and they have to fast, I mean, it doesn't make sense to say that they don't want to have anything to eat. And my thought to that was, "Well, maybe they wish to have something to eat, and maybe they plan to have something to eat afterwards, but they don't actually still want something now so that they're going to go and get it."

Speaker 1:
Right.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
So, I think that sounds a more plausible way to describe this than, it's also not, if you don't have anything, you're not hungry or something like that. I have a broader view of how the kind of bumps of desires and feelings then develop into action, based on what your character is. I think that gives a more plausible view about how this integration is supposed to work.

Speaker 1:
That makes sense. Right, I think we all have that experience. And today, I think we really emphasize the difference across people in, for example, their ability to executive control, and the difference between adolescents and adults, for example, and their ability to do these things. And Aristotle, as I understand it, was sensitive to that, to the differences across people, maybe not between youth and adult, but certainly across people, and their different, natural abilities or where they start from.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Well, how I understand the Doctrine of the Mean, I think what's the right thing for you to do is, what's correct given your circumstances and your own abilities.

Speaker 1:
Right.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
So I give the example of using, somebody's on the battlefield and there's somebody drowning, if they don't know how to swim, it would be rash for them to jump in, but if they do then it would be right. This is a controversial point in Aristotelian studies. Not everybody agrees with that aspect of the Doctrine of the Mean, but it goes back to your question about, is the good being good sort of beyond people? I mean, this is saying, no, it fits whatever your own abilities are. You're not supposed to be like Hercules, or I guess in the Jewish tradition, you're not asked, "Why weren't you Moses?" You're asked, "Why weren't you yourself?"

Speaker 1:
Right. Well let's go more orderly now. One of the things that I first learned that was an issue in Aristotle, decades ago was, that he uses this word, eudaimonia. How did you pronounce it, the same way?

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Eudaimonia?

Speaker 1:
Eudaimonia.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
That's probably a horribly anglicized way of putting it.

Speaker 1:
I noticed Dewey, the philosopher, John Dewey translates that as, wellbeing, and others have translated it, Owen Flanagan, for example, translated it as, flourishing. And so there's always been an issue. Now you say in here, an interesting statement, as I understand it, you want to keep with happiness and you say, "If moderns have merely changed the subject, there would be no disagreement with Aristotle's views, and there is." You want to keep the word, happiness, that we would think of, that would be the word we would use. We understand it has different connotations, but you want to use that word to capture the final end.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Right. Now, I agree that what Aristotle is talking about with happiness is, flourishing, rather than just feeling good, which is how modern people would think of happiness. But I think that if you just translate it, flourishing, then as I said that there isn't any disagreement. I mean, moderns and Aristotle are just talking about different things, and I think that's wrong. I think Aristotle would say, "You moderns have the wrong view about what happiness is, it isn't just feeling good." I mean, it does include feeling good, so in Aristotle's view, "The happy person will have an enjoyable life," he says, but you've sort of got a rather shallow view of what happiness is.

Speaker 1:
Right.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
And so that's why I want to translate it the same way, so there's an actual disagreement about what happiness is, you're not just talking about two separate things and going off on different directions.

Speaker 1:
No, that's very well taken. I mean, I think we can all think of people who are self-satisfied and in a pleasant state of mind, and therefore could be called in happiness, that we would say we don't want that life at all.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Right. I wonder if they would even call that happy or rather, yeah.

Speaker 1:
Yeah. I don't know if you know about... I tried to look at the etymology of happy, and I think I got to hap and it was chance, and then beyond that, it was something like to be well suited, to fit.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
That is similar, because domineer literally comes from the Greek word, dimo, which is sort of like your guardian angel or something. So there's a whole lot of idea that there's luck in there, and that's something that Aristotle addresses people who say, "Well, look, being happy is just a matter of good luck." So there's nothing in particular you can do about that, either you are lucky or you aren't.

Speaker 1:
Right. And we have the word, demonic, which I think also gets at that, that kind of spirit inside, that's not necessarily negative. So you talk about three different converging approaches to happiness, teleological, the method involving endoxa, and then the functional argument. I thought teleological, we don't normally think of Aristotle as teleological, but it is in the sense that we're not following rules, we're looking for something in the future.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Right. There's sort of a goal, it definitely has the idea that you should have a goal. I mean, in Eudemian Ethics, he even says something like it's kind of foolish not to have a goal in your life. That's a bit controversial. I guess this comes from his biological views of there being sort of a goal for a particular animal to become a fully formed adult of their species.

Speaker 1:
Right.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
And he has this tag, "Nature does nothing in vain." So he's got this view that nature is imbued with goal-directed activities, and that also applies to humans. The goals in nature may not be ones that anything sort of has in mind to strive for. So an acorn might be directed to the goal of being an oak tree or something, but it doesn't have that in mind.

Speaker 1:
Right.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
So this is more kind of a naturalistic, but I think that continues in his ethics. And also even with the polis or the city, he thinks that's natural in the sense that people naturally congregate in families, and then in villages and then finally in the polis.

Speaker 1:
Right.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
So there's this general teleological picture that he has, which goes with a number of different things that he says.

Speaker 1:
Right. Okay. And then, endoxa, I was not familiar with that word before reading this text. And now that I have, I think of that famous Rafael painting, The School of Athens, where Aristotle is pointing to the earth, and that seems to be what's going on here, he says, "Let's look at what the opinions actually are here."

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Right. Let's start with not completely nutty opinions, but what do people think about this subject, and go from there. Modern philosophers have criticized Aristotle for this saying, it's too conservative, because you're sticking to what people already think. But as I go on to say, I think he criticizes the endoxa, based on some of his other views. But also, if you open any modern philosophy journal, it does start with, here are what the main people's thoughts on this topic are, then I'm going to proceed from there.

Speaker 1:
That's such a good point. Right. And I know you mentioned the mean though, in another section, but I also thought that we're kind of just talking about that issue of recollection, or originally there are certain views, presumably once Aristotle lays out what happiness is, we're going to recognize it. Not that we have it now, but that we will kind of remember it, or we already know it, or our current views may not be completely clarified, they need clarification, but they're a starting point, then we vary them, then we come back and see them anew. Do you agree with that?

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Yes. It seems like we start from there, and we might criticize them or advise them or whatever, or see what is the insight in these views, and then the results should be recognizable. In the last book of the Nicomachean Ethics, he even says, well, basically, "If these views don't fit in with the way you live your life, then they're not very good."

Speaker 1:
I love that.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
And he starts off with the different views people have about what's the happy life, is generally their lives.

Speaker 1:
Absolutely.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
So ethics is much more related, since it is to how people live their lives, that's going to be different from thinking about math or biology, or some other subject.

Speaker 1:
Right. Yeah, that was kind of astonishing when you pointed it out. He says, "Hence, we ought to examine what has been said by applying it, and if it chimes, we should accept it, if not, it's mere words." Pretty astounding.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Right. This goes back to your sort of bad faith.

Speaker 1:
Well, it's true. That's also true, yes. So when we go to the function arguments, that would be obviously a precursor to evolution. Today, one would think about the human being in terms of evolution and what is our function.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
I'm not sure how it would apply to evolution, although we've developed various things. I mean, it seems as if the conclusion rather is, the happy life has to relate to human beings and involve thinking and feeling, that's kind of what I take away from the argument. And there's a ton of secondary literature on how to understand each line in the argument of what the argument's for, and so on.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
But I think we've got to stick with how humans actually are, although, I guess if you take the reasoning part, that's kind of broader because we can create things beyond human beings. Of course, Aristotle didn't know about that so much in his time, but still he knew about crafts people making different things, and allowing us to do things.

Speaker 1:
I see. That makes sense. And one of the things you say about Aristotle a couple of times, is that he is the quintessential virtue ethicist, which I think as I understand it, you'd contrast virtue ethics with say, utilitarianism and versus a rule based system like Kant's.

Speaker 1:
And as I understand it, in virtue ethics, you're talking about developing a character of a certain sort, as opposed to evaluating specific acts. And the word virtue to me, makes me think we're talking about excellence or achieving something great, not achieving the minimum. I don't know, how do you think of virtual ethics? Why is Aristotle-

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Discussing before that it's not an ideal. I think that there are difficulties with utilitarianism, I mean, seeming to allow some people to be used as means in order to get certain ends. I actually think that reading J.S Millen in a certain way might avoid those problems. But anyway, and the Kantian idea that there are these really hard and fast universal rules that you're supposed to be following, which aren't very plausible. I mean, people have tried to make Kant more like Aristotle, and then Aristotle more like Kant.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
I think once you're including Aristotle and Kant, you should kind of give up on the Kantian bit. But I very much like the Doctrine of the Mean and the virtues, and that's something that even modern, [inaudible 00:24:40], a Aristotelian virtue ethicist don't really pay any attention to. So I think there is a point to the Doctrine of the Mean, and I think that these triads, I mean one big issue is, since there are so many ways to go wrong, why does he pick out these three things?

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
And I think that has to do with picking out three specific mentalities to do with self-knowledge, overestimating one set of vices, and overestimating your abilities and knowledge. One is underestimating and one is sort of getting them right, so there's actually a sort of psychological point of distinguishing these characters. I also think there are other types of vice, that you can sort of waiver from one vice to the other, and so on. But kind of keen on the idea that there are these character traits, maybe we don't want to call them virtues of it, but people due to it, call the time about whether somebody's a kind person, or they're a jerk or whatever.

Speaker 1:
Sure.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Or at other times it might not be feasable for your podcast.

Speaker 1:
Right.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
So we do categorize people this way, even if the terms, virtues and vices sound a bit archaic.

Speaker 1:
Okay. All right.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
But there are a number of people who don't like virtue ethics and they don't want that to be in Aristotle. So for example, Broadie and Rowe's translation, translates, Arete, the term I'm translating, virtue, as excellence all the time. They do that ostensibly, because in Greek you can say things like, talk about the excellence of a knife, it cuts well, or the excellence of, I don't know, an eye is to see well.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
But I don't see why you can't use virtue, well, there is one modern philosopher, Judith Jarvis Thomson, who uses virtue for the virtue of a knife, she's happy talking about that. But even if you weren't, I mean, if you're going to go back to the etymology of Arete, it comes from Arian male, so it literally means, manliness, and that doesn't fit all the virtues that Aristotle's talking about.

Speaker 1:
Sure.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
So, I don't see why we shouldn't use virtue, as I was saying, well, one class I taught Broadie and Rowe's book, and the students were all totally puzzled when I kept talking about virtue ethics. They said, "But there's nothing about virtue in the whole book."

Speaker 1:
So then if I understand it, when you said Aristotle is the quintessential virtue ethicist, you are saying that Aristotle breaks it down into certain, specific, into courage, into magnanimity, and so forth, into certain specific areas that then one optimizes for each of those. Is that the idea, and the [inaudible 00:28:06].

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
So the good person, instead of somebody who learns a lot of rules, or is working to maximize happiness, every general happiness, is doing specific things to sustain their good traits of character.

Speaker 1:
I see.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
I mean, Aristotle was the original founder of the virtue ethics movement, but originally by sort of Elizabeth Anscombe and others, who saw Aristotle as sort of doing virtue ethics, and this is the way to develop things in the future. Now, since then there's a lot of different kinds of virtue ethics, sort of religious virtue ethics, environmental, feminist virtue ethic. There are a lot of developments of the core idea, but I think that they are, I mean, although there are a lot of people working on virtue ethics, it still doesn't seem to be quite as mainstream as the other versions.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
So for example, Derek Parfit wrote this book on what matters, and trying to, as a realist, putting all these different theories together, Kant utilitarianism and social contract theories. And he just doesn't bother about virtue ethics at all, certainly that doesn't matter from his standpoint. So I think that to some people this view, it is still sort not as central as it should be.

Speaker 1:
It is surprising when Aristotle says, "We want to find the mean." Because you do expect, well this is philosophy, it'll be extreme, it'll be one extreme or another. Does this match up with his philosophy in any other areas? Of course he was, I mean if you think about form versus matter, or potentiality and actuality, or any of those things.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
He does have a discussion about the sensors being in a mean, in order to detect other things. One aspect of the Doctrine of the Mean, that I think is important, that others haven't taken up, although I think it's even in Alexander Grant's work, a long time ago, I got this idea in a class at Cornell by Norman Kretzmann, who discussed this idea of in the medieval philosophers, of the mean being, the person is sort of balanced or in equilibrium, so that they then register things in the outside world in the correct way. So if you imagine an old fashioned, the scales on a pivot, and if it's correctly balanced, if you put something on it, it goes down on one end and registers the right amount.

Speaker 1:
Right.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
And that's one way of thinking about the person whose character is in a mean, they're balanced in a way that they can react to external things happening in the right way and do the right thing.

Speaker 1:
The mean is an extreme in that sense, it's this point at which there is balance.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Right. And people said you could maybe call it, I mean, he does say at one point that it's an extreme as a mean, meaning sort of that's the optimum. So if you did sort of a graph, the mean would be at the top, and then the extremes would be at the bottom.

Speaker 1:
Right.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
So, yes, in that sense it's an extreme, he actually says that.

Speaker 1:
Right. Okay. That's interesting. Now, a few sentences from the book that I wondered if you could elaborate on. And one sentence is Aristotle's practical syllogism is described as one of Aristotle's best discoveries by Elizabeth Anscombe. Review that concept of the practical syllogism.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Okay. It sounds like I can explain it on one foot. It's very controversial, what it is and whether it even exists.

Speaker 1:
Okay.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Carlo Natali, in his book on Aristotle, it has a chapter headed something like, "What is it and does it exist?" Or something like that. It's a way of thinking, so you have some general view, I guess that's the major premise, and the one I made up for him, because he doesn't actually give examples of really good ethical cases, or he gives examples where something's gone wrong in thinking, maybe this is because he's writing lecture notes to himself, and it's obvious to him what a good version would be, and he just writes notes about the bad ones.

Speaker 1:
Sure.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
But my idea is that say, generous people help friends in need, and then the minor premise would be, this is a generous person, this is a friend in need, and the conclusion is to help. And what I find interesting about this is, I imagine that the good person sort of using this syllogism doesn't sort of go through each of the bits in turn, or think to themselves, "I'm a generous human being, and that's been attributed to me, that's not what I think." They would just see, "This is my friend in need." And in modern philosophy, things like this and I, are called indexicals, and they kind of get you to act.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
So I think that it's important that this way of thinking has indexicals in it to get you to act. So one issue with whether there is a practical syllogism, is that the theoretical syllogism is all completely general. So how could a syllogism be practical, but how's he thinking of it? And so my idea is, he's thinking of, there are these general things, although they're not totally universal, they're sort for the most part, and you have to see when to apply them. But seeing what the particulars of the situation are, are very important in prompting somebody to actually act in that way.

Speaker 1:
And one of your examples, in a later chapter was about, let's see, a healthy person, I can't remember exactly, but maybe a healthy person doesn't eat this pint of ice cream. But then when it gets down to, I'm a healthy person and here's this particular pint of ice cream right here, somehow it doesn't get applied, this is too powerful for the general statement, the conclusion doesn't come.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Right. Well, this is the case of akrasia, where you should know what the right thing is and don't do it.

Speaker 1:
Right.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
I think in that case, you aren't properly a healthy person. I mean, it might be inspiring to be it. And then since you have a desire for the ice cream that's kind of not integrated, that kind of glops onto the, "This is pleasant." And the desire kind of goes off with that part of the syllogism, and you no longer have the whole thing together.

Speaker 1:
Right. That's interesting. I like that, yeah.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
So that's how I'm understanding how that works. Now that's also controversial, I mean, there's no agreement exactly on how this works. And there are also people who think that there have to be two syllogisms at play, I don't think that's the right way to go. Actually, Anthony Price's view is probably more like mine.

Speaker 1:
Okay.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Yeah. But it's still a more controversial way of thinking about things.

Speaker 1:
Understood. Another sentence that I'm just picking out here is, Dorothea Frede says, "Aristotle's treatment of pleasure is worthy of a Nobel Prize." Could you touch on that as well, what does she mean by that?

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
I think part of what she means is that, there's not very much about pleasure. I guess this is going back to somebody like Jeremy Bentham, who thinks that pleasure is just all this different stuff and you can't differentiate pleasures from each other. And Aristotle is quite sophisticated in how he does that.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Also, he doesn't think that pleasure are just processes, I mean, that was a popular view of the time, especially medical writers. Well, the pleasure is sort of coming into some natural state, and pain is going away from it. And Aristotle is saying, "No, pleasure really comes from activities, and if you're doing the various activities well, then they'll be pleasant." And so that is a rather more sophisticated view of pleasure, than other people have put forward.

Speaker 1:
Right.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Recently though, there has been discussion of the view that's quite popular in psychology about flow, the idea of, when athletes are sort of in the zone, they have flow and it's been suggested that's something that Aristotle might be getting at. It's a little bit hard to see exactly how that works for being a good person, as opposed to, well, I suppose if you're really engrossed in doing good activities, is going to be pleasant, it's not something that you're consciously thinking about getting.

Speaker 1:
Right. The other thing that people often note about Aristotle is that he talks about friendship. Friendship is an important part of happiness. And I guess, one of the things that's surprising about that is you would think he would talk about love, not friendship. Friendship seems too tame, we need something more romantic and more passionate than friendship. For the modern reader, that seems, "Why are we talking about friendship?"

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Well, I suppose in Greek friendship, for Leah, it does come from philia, to love.

Speaker 1:
Okay.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
So it is sort of loving other people, in that respect.

Speaker 1:
Okay.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
It covers a whole lot of different relationships. So in Aristotle it can cover some sexual relationships or friendships, or acquaintances, or a civic friendship is the bonds you have with other people who live in the same society that you do, and so on. So it's a very broad notion, but also in Aristotle, it's quite narrow because he wants to narrow it down, in the end the best kind of friendship is between good people, and that's pleasant and useful, and based in good character. So part of the discussion I think is to show people, I mean, if he can really show you that you can't have good friends unless you're a good person, that's a pretty good incentive to become a good person.

Speaker 1:
That is.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
If you realize what people are or what friends are only transactional, and so on.

Speaker 1:
That's interesting. Right. Well, I guess part of the symptom is that it doesn't seem that important. And I take it that, well, you keep seeing in this text or in Aristotle, this symmetry between, or this mirror image between the polis and the individual, they have the same structure, and they're structured the same way, we can think of them the same way, we can reason about them. Is it true that for Aristotle to be happy, you would need to live in a good polis, or you would need to live in a just polis?

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
I think that you would, well, you certainly can't be happy or you can't even be fully human according to Aristotle, unless you live in a polis. So he says the only beings that live outside of polis would be the wild animals, or God, we're not self-sufficient, so we need a polis. It does look as if you need to have a lot of good things going on in order to become a good person. But in the politics, I guess one idea, which is [inaudible 00:42:18] by Richard Kratos, if you're living in a bad society, it would be the role of a good person to try and change things or make improvements.

Speaker 1:
Okay.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
So you couldn't become good. In my book on Aristotle's Thought and Feeling, I discuss more what happens if you're brought up badly, or what if you're, say a woman in ancient Greece, could you become a good person? And if you couldn't, would you be blamed for that, and so on. So I think those are important questions.

Speaker 1:
Interesting.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
And I try and ask Aristotle then and see whether he could give a response to those kinds of issues.

Speaker 1:
Nice. The thing that really stands out is this opposition between Aristotle then, and Adam Smith, because there you have completely separating the two. We don't get our dinner because of the benevolence of the butcher and the baker and the brewer, but from their own selfishness, and that's really ingrained in the way we view society. So I think that's why it's strange to see or the way I view, it's strange to hear Aristotle say this.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Yeah, I think we're very individualistic, everybody can sort of get on, on their own. And we have the idea of self-sufficiency, and it means you can get on, on your own without any help. But then once people think about this, so I've been teaching a class on Plato's Lysis about friendship. Once people start thinking about self-sufficiency, they sort of change their mind, I mean, how did they get where they were in the first place? They needed parents and other people and a whole lot of help.

Speaker 1:
Right.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
So Aristotle says at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, that what being self-sufficiency means, what's sufficient for you and your family and the other people, and so forth. So it's a different idea of what it is to be self-sufficient.

Speaker 1:
Understood.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Unfortunately, I think he goes back a bit on this in Book 10.

Speaker 1:
Yeah, well Book 10 is kind of strange, isn't it?

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Yes, it's a bit-

Speaker 1:
It's puzzling.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
A lot of different things going on there.

Speaker 1:
Right.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
But the Book 1 discussion seems fairly clear on what he means by self-sufficiency.

Speaker 1:
Understood. Okay. Well, we're over time here, but Professor Paula Gottlieb, thank you so much. The book is Aristotle's Ethics, Nicomachean and Eudemian Themes. It was very informative to read, and I really appreciate you talking to me about it.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Well, thank you very much.