NIcomachean Ethics I.7a

Let us again return to the good we are seeking, and ask what it can be. It seems different in different actions and arts; it is different in medicine, in strategy, and in the other arts likewise. What then is the good of each? Surely that for whose sake everything else is done. In medicine this is health, in strategy victory, in architecture a house, in any other sphere something else, and in every action and pursuit the end; for it is for the sake of this that all men do whatever else they do. Therefore, if there is an end for all that we do, this will be the good achievable by action, and if there are more than one, these will be the goods achievable by action.

So the argument has by a different course reached the same point; but we must try to state this even more clearly. Since there are evidently more than one end, and we choose some of these (e.g. wealth, flutes, and in general instruments) for the sake of something else, clearly not all ends are final ends; but the chief good is evidently something final. Therefore, if there is only one final end, this will be what we are seeking, and if there are more than one, the most final of these will be what we are seeking. 

So we are looking for the good that we seek from our chosen actions. Aristotle points out that there may be one, or sometimes more than one. He isn't interested in cataloging everything we want to accomplish with every action, however: he's looking for the chief thing that human actions seek. 

He has a couple of heuristics for sorting out what that chief good really is. One of them is that some goods are not pursued for themselves, but as a means-to-an-end for obtaining something else. Wealth, for example, is one he has already told us is always sought for something else. No one really wants piles of cash or coins to swim in, a la Scrooge McDuck; people want wealth for the other things they can trade it to obtain. Thus, even though very many of our actions are taken to obtain wealth, wealth is not a candidate for the chief end. Neither are things sought as means-to-ends for other ends: we should look at the final ends for our candidates.

Now we call that which is in itself worthy of pursuit more final than that which is worthy of pursuit for the sake of something else, and that which is never desirable for the sake of something else more final than the things that are desirable both in themselves and for the sake of that other thing, and therefore we call final without qualification that which is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else.

Now such a thing happiness, above all else, is held to be; for this we choose always for self and never for the sake of something else, but honour, pleasure, reason, and every virtue we choose indeed for themselves (for if nothing resulted from them we should still choose each of them), but we choose them also for the sake of happiness, judging that by means of them we shall be happy. Happiness, on the other hand, no one chooses for the sake of these, nor, in general, for anything other than itself.

The second heuristic is a variation of the first. Some things we would choose as final ends, such as honor: it is right to do the honorable thing even if it leads to nothing other than the fate of having lived with honor. Yet such things, though worthy as ends-in-themselves, can also be chosen because they will reasonably reliably produce other things. Remember I.3: we are looking for rules that hold 'for the most part' or 'probably,' allowing for a world that contains chance and fate. An honorable action is worthy of choice even if it leads to death, but behaving honorably will reasonably reliably lead to other goods as well. It may lead to wealth, if it is rewarded; political success, if it builds a reputation in consideration of which people would vote for you; and whatever other end was being sought by the honorable action, as for example if it was courage in battle. The battle was being fought for some reason other than the opportunity to show honor and courage, after all.

Thus, while honor is a final good, it is not the chief and final good we seek. Aristotle thinks that happiness is a good candidate -- but recall that there was already a problem that people don't agree on what happiness entails. That still needs to be defined. 

From the point of view of self-sufficiency the same result seems to follow; for the final good is thought to be self-sufficient. Now by self-sufficient we do not mean that which is sufficient for a man by himself, for one who lives a solitary life, but also for parents, children, wife, and in general for his friends and fellow citizens, since man is born for citizenship. 

For Aristotle's account of why humanity is born for some sort of political life, see Politics I.2ff.

But some limit must be set to this; for if we extend our requirement to ancestors and descendants and friends' friends we are in for an infinite series.

Aristotle has a significant account of the infinite. Potential infinites do exist for him, for example, one can potentially divide any single unit in half, in half again, etc. For mathematics the potential infinites suffice. Actually infinite series are impossible to complete, and therefore inadmissible to practical philosophy. It can't do in ethics to have an infinite series of obligations, for example, because no human being can practically satisfy it. We are looking for things that are practical in ethics. 

Let us examine this question, however, on another occasion; the self-sufficient we now define as that which when isolated makes life desirable and lacking in nothing; and such we think happiness to be; and further we think it most desirable of all things, without being counted as one good thing among others- if it were so counted it would clearly be made more desirable by the addition of even the least of goods; for that which is added becomes an excess of goods, and of goods the greater is always more desirable. Happiness, then, is something final and self-sufficient, and is the end of action.

OK, with the continued proviso that happiness hasn't yet received and agreed-upon definition. The thoughts of the Wise were dismissed in I.5. 

Presumably, however, to say that happiness is the chief good seems a platitude, and a clearer account of what it is still desired. This might perhaps be given, if we could first ascertain the function of man. For just as for a flute-player, a sculptor, or an artist, and, in general, for all things that have a function or activity, the good and the 'well' is thought to reside in the function, so would it seem to be for man, if he has a function. Have the carpenter, then, and the tanner certain functions or activities, and has man none? Is he born without a function? Or as eye, hand, foot, and in general each of the parts evidently has a function, may one lay it down that man similarly has a function apart from all these? What then can this be?

Here we are looking for the telos of human life, that is, the proper end of it. For those of you who read Iakovos' article on good upbringing mentioned in the commentary on I.4, you will recall that it begins with modern philosophy's desire to reject that there is such a thing as a single telos for human life. Iakovos has his own argument for why we should continue with Aristotle even absent a human telos.

We can, though, apply our practical reason to other parts of ourselves to find a telos. We can judge that the telos of our eyes is to see, for example, with a fairly straightforward application of our reason. We can then judge whether an eye performs its function well or badly. We reason that we should correct eyes that cannot see 20/20 with our optical arts. 

Note that we have the art to alter their vision further, and for some purposes that is appropriate: when you wish to shoot a deer precisely across a meadow, it can be helpful temporarily to see much further with the eye than 20/20. We judge that 20/20 is the right scale with reference to the overall human being: the eye's correct general telos is to see at that range because that is the range that enables you to participate in a complete human life most easily. At that range you can navigate a human city, read a human menu in a human restaurant, and otherwise participate in the life most fit for human beings. (See, again, the Politics for Aristotle's thinking on this.) 

Thus, even in the clear-cut case of an eye having a telos, we need to make reference to an overarching human telos. Modern philosophers may reject such a thing on the grounds that they would prefer the freedom to determine their own final ends; but regardless of why they reject it, they cannot practically do without it. Since ethics is a practical science, one cannot abandon even pragmatically necessary conditions; and therefore, says I, there's no getting around the thing. Just as Kant deduces that one must always act under the idea of freedom in his Groundwork (and thus that determinism, even if it were true, is useless in ethics), I deduce that a human telos is likewise necessary for ethical thought.

Tomorrow we will discover what Aristotle thinks human happiness is, properly speaking. 

Sympathy vs. Empathy

To follow up on a comment I made at AVI's place, I don't think of 'empathy' as an unalloyed good; but this study makes an error in making it a subset of sympathy. The two terms have very different histories, etymologies, and mean something importantly different as well. 

To give the etymology is to give the history in an important sense, so let's start with sympathy.

1580s (1570s in Latin form), "affinity between certain things" (body and soul, persons and their garments), from French sympathie (16c.) and directly from Late Latin sympathia "community of feeling, sympathy," from Greek sympatheia "fellow-feeling, community of feeling," from sympathēs "having a fellow feeling, affected by like feelings," from assimilated form of syn- "together" (see syn-) + pathos "feeling," which is related to paskhein, pathein "suffer" (from PIE root *kwent(h)- "to suffer").

Sympathy thus implies a natural connection or community as the root of the fellow-feeling. You could feel sympathy for your brother, but also a member of your church or community organization; more extended but still valid, for a fellow firefighter or veteran, a fellow American, a fellow Westerner, etc. The idea is that there is some sort of real connection that makes you recognize a likeness between yourself and the one suffering, and this causes you to share in their suffering to some degree.

Empathy, by contrast, is an art project.

1908, modeled on German Einfühlung (from ein "in" + Fühlung "feeling"), which was coined 1858 by German philosopher Rudolf Lotze (1817-1881) as a translation of Greek empatheia "passion, state of emotion," from assimilated form of en "in" (see en- (2)) + pathos "feeling" (from PIE root *kwent(h)- "to suffer"). A term from a theory of art appreciation that maintains appreciation depends on the viewer's ability to project his personality into the viewed object.

'Not only do I see gravity and modesty and pride and courtesy and stateliness, but I feel or act them in the mind's muscles. This is, I suppose, a simple case of empathy, if we may coin that term as a rendering of Einfühlung; there is nothing curious or idiosyncratic about it; but it is a fact that must be mentioned.' [Edward Bradford Titchener, "Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought Processes," 1909]

The concept here is that a connection doesn't really exist between you and the other person: indeed, since it was coined in the service of art appreciation, there needn't actually be another person who is really suffering at all. The art is conjuring an idea of suffering in your mind, that -- according to the analogy of 'the mind' as having muscle movements -- causes it to feel, inwardly (ein/in), a sense of suffering. In this way it is an egotistical feeling, just as described: 'a projection of his personality into the viewed object.' 

Empathy is really dangerous. It can cause us to interfere passionately in matters we don't really know anything about, because there's no actual connection between us and the alleged suffering. We end up drawn into other people's wars. We end up drawn into inter-family conflict that is far too dense for us to really help or even grasp. Empathy can allow pictures painted in the media, using the tools of cinema and art, to drive even mass popular movements into the streets. It can, insofar as it successfully makes us feel deep psychic pain on behalf of the alleged suffering, justify extraordinary measures in defiance of ordinary constraints on our behavior. It has, when so used, given rise to tremendous brutality.

It's better to mind your business. Be mindful, I would suggest, when you find yourself experiencing fellow-feeling: ask yourself if it is coming from a real connection between you and the suffering, or if it is one being conjured by art. Beware the conjurers. 

UPDATE: The OED:

Nicomachean Ethics I.6b

I will restate what I told Thomas Doubting in the comments below: take heart. Not all of the Nicomachean Ethics is as dense as the passages we are dealing with right now. After the first book, it will become much easier sailing. The rest of Book I is pretty dense, though. That's why we are taking it so slowly. Getting all this part right makes the rest easy to understand. You do have to work through the hard parts seriously, and not just skip over them to get to the fun parts about courage and friendship. They are coming, however.

Today we will discuss the second part of Book I, section 6.

But let us discuss these matters elsewhere; an objection to what we have said, however, may be discerned in the fact that the Platonists have not been speaking about all goods, and that the goods that are pursued and loved for themselves are called good by reference to a single Form, while those which tend to produce or to preserve these somehow or to prevent their contraries are called so by reference to these, and in a secondary sense. Clearly, then, goods must be spoken of in two ways, and some must be good in themselves, the others by reason of these.

Here Aristotle is acknowledging the Platonic defense I mentioned yesterday, while insisting that "good" has to have at least two meanings in order for that defense to be valid. 

This is part of a larger Aristotelian point that he mentioned yesterday in passing when he said that "'good' has as many senses as 'being.'" In Metaphysics Γ.2, Aristotle says that 'being is said in many ways,' and it is true: when we use words like "is" or "are" to speak of things that exist ("John is") or that have certain qualities ("John is bold," "...is my nephew") we are doing several different things. Aristotle is the root of Aquinas' and Avicenna's conception that being and goodness are in fact the same thing, but here we can see that Aristotle isn't wholly committed to that point because he is willing to accept that "good" could have not less than two senses, but not necessarily as many as "being" does. (How many is that? It's complicated.)

Let us separate, then, things good in themselves from things useful, and consider whether the former are called good by reference to a single Idea. What sort of goods would one call good in themselves? Is it those that are pursued even when isolated from others, such as intelligence, sight, and certain pleasures and honours? Certainly, if we pursue these also for the sake of something else, yet one would place them among things good in themselves. Or is nothing other than the Idea of good good in itself? In that case the Form will be empty. But if the things we have named are also things good in themselves, the account of the good will have to appear as something identical in them all, as that of whiteness is identical in snow and in white lead. But of honour, wisdom, and pleasure, just in respect of their goodness, the accounts are distinct and diverse. The good, therefore, is not some common element answering to one Idea.

Aristotle begins by denying that the Platonic Form of the Good can exist by showing two ways that it might exist, and denying each of the horns of that dilemma. The first is that "things that are Good in themselves" only includes the Form of the Good itself; but if that were true, the Platonic Form wouldn't be the form of anything else, and therefore the Form would be empty. That clearly isn't what Plato wanted; he wanted a Form that embraced and unified all the various good things.

Then, by analogy to a physical quality, Aristotle attempts to show that the qualities being unified aren't a good fit for a Form. When we say that snow and white lead are both white, we mean something that these days is easy to explain: they are reflecting light waves in such a way that our eyes send signals to our brain that our brain interprets as 'white.' When we say that honor is good and that wisdom is good and that pleasure is good, we mean different things -- or so Aristotle says here. Since they aren't the same thing, a unifying Form seems to be inappropriate.

Is Aristotle right about this? Not obviously, not even on his own terms. As I mentioned when discussing EN I.2, in the Rhetoric he gives an account of how honor can be used as a means of creating a comparable system of valuation for apparently unlike goods. It turns out that it is possible to treat the goods of pleasure and wisdom as comparable, which means there must be something that does unify them on a scale of value. That something is honor, which is his other candidate for a thing good in itself. 

So when we sit around as properly brought-up men and women and discuss whether pleasure or wisdom is more honorable, we are talking about the goods of all of these things as if they were one kind of thing, possessed in a larger or smaller quantity. If so, the Platonic idea seems more defensible than he is giving it credit for here. 

But what then do we mean by the good? It is surely not like the things that only chance to have the same name. Are goods one, then, by being derived from one good or by all contributing to one good, or are they rather one by analogy?

Analogy is an Aristotelian defense against the idea I just raised: maybe there isn't a real comparison between pleasure and wisdom, but we can use honor as a way of creating an analogy between them. Analogies always break, as I frequently remark here, because comparing unlike things will always run into a point of dissimilarity unless it turns out that you were really comparing the same thing by different names (e.g. "Clark Kent is [analogy] with Superman"). 

Wisdom and pleasure are obviously not the same thing by different names. Is the goodness in them analogous, or is it really the case that we can compare the goodness of pleasure with the goodness of wisdom? 

As is often true in philosophy, it is possible to argue this one from either side. You could say that there is an analogy just because the pleasure one will get from getting drunk instead of studying Aristotle tonight is just different from whatever good comes from the increased wisdom you get by studying Aristotle. Perhaps, then, we are just making an analogy.

On the other hand, it does seem like we can easily judge between whether we are ourselves made better by drinking or by study; so there is a common good, the good for us, that is seems to be the same. If we are doing it as Aristotle himself suggests, by comparing the honor involved, there is some honor to be gained by drinking heroically among friends; but there is more to be had by obtaining a reputation for wisdom among those same friends. So again, this doesn't seem to be an analogy: it does seem that in both cases we are comparing the same thing to itself. 

Certainly as sight is in the body, so is reason in the soul, and so on in other cases. But perhaps these subjects had better be dismissed for the present; for perfect precision about them would be more appropriate to another branch of philosophy.

Here is the point about each science having its own fit subject. Aristotle wants to talk about ethics; but he's veered into metaphysics, and now is starting to talk about natural philosophy (the precursor of medical science). 

And similarly with regard to the Idea; even if there is some one good which is universally predicable of goods or is capable of separate and independent existence, clearly it could not be achieved or attained by man; but we are now seeking something attainable.

This argument seems neatly to exclude Platonic thought from the field of ethics. A man can't attain one of the Forms, even if he might pursue it; but ethics should aim at something men could obtain. There is an obvious counterargument, which Aristotle gives immediately to acknowledge and reject it.

Perhaps, however, some one might think it worth while to recognize this with a view to the goods that are attainable and achievable; for having this as a sort of pattern we shall know better the goods that are good for us, and if we know them shall attain them. This argument has some plausibility, but seems to clash with the procedure of the sciences; for all of these, though they aim at some good and seek to supply the deficiency of it, leave on one side the knowledge of the good.

So if you could grasp the Form of the Good, it could at least lead you to the goods you could obtain because you would recognize that they instantiated goodness in some way. Then you could usefully employ Platonic ideals ethically. Aristotle acknowledges the plausibility of that, but stands on the division of sciences (the division that he has himself been violating throughout this discussion of metaphysics as applied to ethics).

Yet that all the exponents of the arts should be ignorant of, and should not even seek, so great an aid is not probable. It is hard, too, to see how a weaver or a carpenter will be benefited in regard to his own craft by knowing this 'good itself', or how the man who has viewed the Idea itself will be a better doctor or general thereby. For a doctor seems not even to study health in this way, but the health of man, or perhaps rather the health of a particular man; it is individuals that he is healing.

Here are just some further objections to a high and distant Good as useful for practical purposes. We have a mechanism for testing these arguments that Aristotle did not. In later Christian thought this will become aligned with the idea of God. Is knowing God useful to a weaver in the production of good weavings? It might be; it has certainly been men who pursued knowledge of God who made extraordinary stained glass, or stonework cathedrals. Would it make you a better doctor? It might; even in our relatively secular society, a large proportion of hospitals are explicitly religious entities. 

But enough of these topics.

You may be glad to see this final remark! I find this part very interesting, but it has taken a long time to get to the point that I feel qualified to comment as a sort-of equal in the discussion -- not a true equal, but perhaps as a kind of junior partner to this ancient debate. I feel like I understand what is going on at last, and what the stakes of the discussion are. That is something quite worthwhile, which I hope I can introduce to you. 

The L.A. Riots and the Misuse of History

 

Aeschylus, the father of Greek tragedy, is credited with the quote, “In war, truth is the first casualty.” This maxim can also be applied to political advocacy, and no offender is worse than Victor Davis Hanson.

Last night Mr. Hanson appeared on the Fox Network’s Laura Ingraham show claiming that California’s Governor, Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor, Karen Bass are Neo-Confederates in a tortured attempt to draw a parallel between the rioting in L.A. and the Civil War. This is a ridiculous claim he regularly makes when discussing the sanctuary policies of California and L.A. This nonsense has the unfortunate effect of distorting history and undermining the political point he was trying to make.

To the degree Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass make an argument in support of their incompetent handling, or non-handling, of illegal immigration it appears to be based in a perverted humanitarianism grounded in an open borders ideology. None of their statements refer in any way to secession, states rights, or even nullification (Nullification predates the Civil War but is associated with the South due to the Southern statemen such as Thomas Jefferson, James Maddison, And John C. Calhoun that advocated the idea). Consequently, it’s patently inaccurate to draw comparisons between Newsom and Bass with the Confederacy. The only thing accomplished with such unnecessarily incendiary claims is to spread historical ignorance and undermine genuine criticism of the incompetent performance of Newsom and Bass. Mr. Hanson has sacrificed historical accuracy in an attempt to score a cheap political point. (Cross posted on my Facebook page)  

 

     

Nicomachean Ethics I.6a

We are going to have to slow down even more, and take a couple of days to go over this section. There is a lot going on here. We will only tackle the first half of this section today.

We had perhaps better consider the universal good and discuss thoroughly what is meant by it, although such an inquiry is made an uphill one by the fact that the Forms have been introduced by friends of our own. Yet it would perhaps be thought to be better, indeed to be our duty, for the sake of maintaining the truth even to destroy what touches us closely, especially as we are philosophers or lovers of wisdom; for, while both are dear, piety requires us to honour truth above our friends.

We have been discussing what is the proper end of ethics. Aristotle points out that we also need to come to a general idea about what it means for something to be 'good,' since we surely want something good to be the end of our ethics. But what is it 'to be good'? Aristotle not-very-gently suggests that Plato and the other Platonists of the Academy, whom he does not name but who were his friends as well as his teachers, have caused a lot of difficulty by introducing their bad ideas about Forms. He feels a duty as a philosopher (which just means 'lover of wisdom': philo - sophia) to try to get at the truth even though it means refuting his friends publicly.

Aristotle and Plato both believed in what we call hylomorphism. This word means that things are composed of both matter-that-can-be-organized-lots-of-ways (hyle means 'wood,' but stands here for any sort of matter that can be used to construct something else, as wood can be made into a bed or a ship or a house) that is then organized according to a form (morphē- here is 'form'). They differ quite a bit in their conception of how this relationship works. 

Aside: while we are talking about this today in order to understand Aristotle, these metaphysics are not as arcane as you might imagine. You can read a paper I wrote defending the idea that hylomorphism is actually a better way of thinking about the world we live in according to our modern scientific understanding than the usual alternatives. 

For Plato, the Forms are somewhere else: exactly where is not clear from what we have left of the Academy's thought. Later Neoplatonists, from Plotinus, perhaps were carrying forward Platonist ideas in asserting that there must be One that is ultimate and unified, and in the mind of that One would be the forms as Ideas: ideas in the mind of God, if you like. Aristotle, who was directly taught by Plato, will use the words Form and Idea interchangeably in this sense, so it could be that Plato's doctrine was indeed close to that (though there seem to have been two principles for Plato: the One, and something opposed to it. Avicenna demonstrates the impossibility of this 'dyad' concept in his Metaphysics of the Healing). In any case the Form of the Lion is not in the individual lion, but is a feature of basic reality whose independent existence from any actual lions is what enables lions to exist in the world. If the idea of the lion didn't exist in the mind of God, to extend that helpful metaphor, reality would not support lions existing in the world.

Aristotle has a much more straightforward account of how this works. Form for him is 'the way in which the matter is organized,' and therefore the form is in the thing. If you have some wood and you put it into the form of a table, you have a table. If you put it into the form of a chair instead, you have a chair and not a table. The wood doesn't change: in fact, if you imagine that you can use all and exactly the same wood to make either a chair or a table, you will see the point of the doctrine. The wood is the same wood whether it is a chair, a table, or a pile of parts lying on the floor. Thus, the material is the same. What changes is the form of organization. 

Importantly, though the form is in the thing -- or, as you might prefer to say, the thing is in the form -- the form is not itself material. The material, again, hasn't changed. The form is therefore immaterial; and this deduction proves that materialism, which most intellectuals believe in today, is false. The immaterial not only exists, it is fundamental to things being whatever it is that they are. 

So, with all that background, we can begin trying to understand what Aristotle wants to say about 'the good.' 

The men who introduced this doctrine [i.e. Plato's doctrine of Forms] did not posit Ideas of classes within which they recognized priority and posteriority (which is the reason why they did not maintain the existence of an Idea embracing all numbers); but the term 'good' is used both in the category of substance and in that of quality and in that of relation, and that which is per se, i.e. substance, is prior in nature to the relative (for the latter is like an off shoot and accident of being); so that there could not be a common Idea set over all these goods.

This sentence employs a lot of mental furniture that Aristotle himself built. Aristotle divided the world into two kinds of things: substances and attributes. Substances are things like men or horses -- those are Aristotle's favorite examples -- and they are the primary things (just as he says here). Attributes only exist as qualities that belong to substances. 

"Relation" is a particular kind of attribute. It is a little clumsy, because a relationship links two things. Say you have a father and a son; there is, then, a relation attribute that links them. If attributes only exist insofar as they belong to a substance, which one does it belong to? 

The answer for Aristotle is that there are two relations: the father has one of being "related to the son," and the son has a different one of being "related to the father." That's a very strange way of thinking about relationships -- and, I think, wrong: relationships are real, which is a metaphysical discussion for another day -- but it does allow Aristotle to preserve his metaphysical model of only two kinds of things existing. 

So, you can now understand his objection: "good" as an idea can't be the same thing for substances as for attributes, because they differ in priority. Substances are the primary things of the world. The attributes don't matter nearly as much, and can't exist independently. What's good for the substance is good in a higher and better way than anything could be good 'for an attribute.' 

Plato might reply that the Idea of the Good (or the Form of the Good) still is necessary for understanding what it means for things to be good for anything at all; the fact that there might be a 'good for substances' and 'good for attributes' doesn't mean there isn't a 'Good in itself' standing above those two subcategories and unifying them. But we aren't here to discuss Plato today.

Further, since 'good' has as many senses as 'being' (for it is predicated both in the category of substance, as of God and of reason, and in quality, i.e. of the virtues, and in quantity, i.e. of that which is moderate, and in relation, i.e. of the useful, and in time, i.e. of the right opportunity, and in place, i.e. of the right locality and the like), clearly it cannot be something universally present in all cases and single; for then it could not have been predicated in all the categories but in one only.

The categories are Aristotle's too -- we have a book by that name from him, and you will find his explanation of substance and attribute in it as well as many other things. You can see the point he is making: if Good was only one, it would belong to one category, not all the categories. Plato's rebuttal would presumably be the same: for the concept of 'goodness per se' to make any sense, there has to be an overarching unity that connects all the different goods in the various categories. 

Further, since of the things answering to one Idea there is one science, there would have been one science of all the goods; but as it is there are many sciences even of the things that fall under one category, e.g. of opportunity, for opportunity in war is studied by strategics and in disease by medicine, and the moderate in food is studied by medicine and in exercise by the science of gymnastics.

This is a very similar objection. Why isn't there a Science of the Good, which contains all knowledge pertaining to the pursuit of any good thing? (In fact, there is: metaphysics is the science of existence, and existence -- we shall learn from Aristotle and those who followed him -- is the same thing as goodness. Aquinas has quite a lot to say about that point, following Aristotle and Avicenna.)  

And one might ask the question, what in the world they mean by 'a thing itself', is (as is the case) in 'man himself' and in a particular man the account of man is one and the same. For in so far as they are man, they will in no respect differ; and if this is so, neither will 'good itself' and particular goods, in so far as they are good. But again it will not be good any the more for being eternal, since that which lasts long is no whiter than that which perishes in a day. The Pythagoreans seem to give a more plausible account of the good, when they place the one in the column of goods; and it is they that Speusippus seems to have followed.

Speusippus was one of Plato's nephews, a member of the Academy who rose to its head after Plato's death. Aristotle discusses his works more in the Metaphysics. 

If you like, you can sum up this first part of 1.6 as "Plato and the Academy are just wrong about the Good." That does not give us an account of what goodness is, however, just why Aristotle thinks it isn't what they thought it was. 

Dollar a Day

Charley Crockett, descendant of Col. Davy Crockett, singing a cowboy tune.

More Serious Matters

What's the over/under on how long it takes a Federal judge to tell the President he can't deploy the National Guard in California?

Here's the relevant law. The NYT seems to think that provision (2) is the important one, but I'd think it was (3). The Federal government deployed regular law enforcement and found them attacked by big mobs in LA; thus, they are not able to execute the laws of the United States with the regular forces assigned to that. You don't have to go as far as "rebellion," although riots and rebellions are matters of degree rather than kind. 

So, probably today a judge will step in? Maybe not until tomorrow, since today is a Sunday?

WWF

Another person points out something I've been suggesting for years: Trump learned his political rhetoric from his time with the World Wrestling Federation (later "Entertainment"). It's just not that serious. 

The Trump-Musk breakup is performance art for the Age of the Internet Era. Two cartoon-like celebrities with massive egos went from a superhero duo to arch-nemeses with the tap of a phone. It’s no different from Wrestlemania III, when friends and “faces” Hulk Hogan and André the Giant went from friends to enemies in the twinkling of a body blow. Back then, only 8-year-old boys took the performances seriously. Now, the entire commentariat is atwitter with apprehension and advice.

I think the same people love/hate Trump as professional wrestling. It's hard not to take it seriously now that it involves the highest levels of government and there can be real consequences that affect many people, but it's important to refuse to take it seriously anyway. It's the truth that they're not being serious, after all, and seeing and speaking the truth is crucial. 

Hot Time in the State of Franklin

Once upon a time, there was a US state called Franklin that comprised East Tennessee and Western North Carolina's mountainous regions. There are some historic sites in Johnson City, Tennessee, if you are ever passing through there. 

Prior to 1796, Tennessee didn’t exist.  The population that existed at the time and that made up east Tennessee wanted to form a state. So in 1784, they wrote a constitution, elected a governor and began business affairs. They called their new found state, the State of Franklin.

The State of Franklin was an interesting little place.... In Franklin, they never used money. They created a complicated system of barter. They also banned ministers of the gospel and lawyers from public office in their constitution.

During this time, this part of Tennessee belonged to North Carolina. When the people from the State of Franklin proposed their new home to Congress, North Carolina fought against passing their proposal.

One day I hope to see Franklin restored, as that polity makes a lot more sense than lumping mountainous Western North Carolina with the more heavily urban down-east parts. 

Treating the State of Franklin as a geographic entity for the purpose of this post, it's had an interesting week.

Asheville saw a gunfight that left one man killed by another man's illegally concealed firearm, but which will see no charges forthcoming from the local police. 

The Blue Ridge Parkway was temporarily closed, and Federal investigators brought in to investigate an improvised incendiary device found at the Folk Art Center. 

Gatlinburg saw a car careen through its crowds, injuring six. This was feared to be an act of terrorism, similar to a famous one in Nice, France and a recent one in New Orleans; it proved to be a woman who had a cardiac while driving. She was the only fatality. 

An Anniversary of Liberty

Today is of course June 6th, famously the anniversary of D-Day; but June 4-7 is also the anniversary of the Battle of Midway, which Richard Fernandez ("Wretchard the Cat") has been celebrating this year. Each of these battles, two years apart, marked the beginning of the end for one of the Axis powers. 

All Americans know about and understand D-Day reasonably well, I believe; certainly in my generation that was true. Midway is less well-known. Perhaps sea battles are harder to visualize or convey. It was just as important. In the morning of June 4th, 1942 the Japanese Navy was the best remaining after the destruction of much of our fleet at Pearl Harbor, and many of its ships were best-in-class anyway. By the close of the battle the war had decisively turned against them. There were very tough fights ahead, but the direction of the war was clear from Midway.

There was a Douglas SBD Dauntless at the Udvar-Hazy center, which occasioned a brief recounting of the Battle of Midway from my son our tour guide. There were a few points he was hazy upon that I could fill in, but overall he at least of his generation understood it just fine. 

Two Japanese carriers were sunk by one pilot, Richard Halsey Best. The battle did not cost him his life, but bad air in his plane's recycling system cost him his career: he was medically retired the same year due to lung damage. He lived to this century and is buried at Arlington. 

Hillbilly Highway to Guitar Town

Another Attempt to Explain Young Men to Democrats

 

Yeah, you know, just keep doing what you're doing. You'll be fine.

One Pass at Explaining Young Men to Democrats

There's a lot of talk about Democrats' $20MM effort to try to understand how they lost young men so emphatically. At AVI's place yesterday, I quoted a section from the famous essay "The Personal is Political."

I think “apolitical” women are not in the movement for very good reasons, and as long as we say “you have to think like us and live like us to join the charmed circle,” we will fail. What I am trying to say is that there are things in the consciousness of “apolitical” women (I find them very political) that are as valid as any political consciousness we think we have. We should figure out why many women don’t want to do action. Maybe there is something wrong with the action or something wrong with why we are doing the action or maybe the analysis of why the action is necessary is not clear enough in our minds.

That approach worked really well. If they really want to win young men, they should try exactly the same approach with the same degree of seriousness. Maybe there is something wrong with the actions they are taking, or why they are doing those actions; or maybe they need to think more clearly about the whole project.

Because my son is in the right demographic, I happen to know quite a few young men. Here is what I hear from them.

1) They are angry that their educations were useless. Democrats control teachers unions and education bureaucracies everywhere. My son explained from middle school, with me to reinforce this, that he wanted to be an engineer and needed more math. The teachers and administrators explained that there was nothing they could do: he had to take the required literature and social studies courses. The high school offered pre-calculus and calculus classes, but to get to them you had to navigate a very tight path and somehow he could never get room in a schedule between the required courses. He ended up at least a year and probably two years behind in math from where he wanted to be. 

2) Meanwhile, those literature and social studies courses were heavy on indoctrination: diversity literature, 'geography' studies that focused on the lingering effects of slavery, history that taught important figures like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman but not others who weren't considered proper role models (as if history was about teaching role models rather than how the world became what it is today). They know the schooling they have had has been aimed at breaking their spirits and making them compliant, not empowering them to succeed. 

3) They can see the political system aims to reduce them to tax farms to fund benefits for others. All these scholarships go to others, especially to women but also various favored minority groups. For those who don't succeed with the scholarships, there is Section 8 housing and Aid to Families with Dependent Children and a host of other benefits, which will be paid for by the taxes levied on these young men. Though in principle these are gender-neutral, in practice women who have children with men they didn't marry or did but left get the children and access to the benefits (plus child support from the men). The Democratic-led education establishment is at once trying to suppress their accomplishment and lift other people over them economically and culturally, and the Democratic platform aims at using them as a source of funds all their lives.

4) Finally, these young men find that the young women they fancy -- as young men will -- have totally bought into all this ideological indoctrination and economic benefits package, which is entirely in their favor. When looking for mates they find women who defiantly express demands that they consent to all the ideology, and all the exploitation. The women like that they will be given a leg up in education and career, and if it doesn't work out they will have the back-up plan of government aid. The young men are being offered the duty of supporting these women and any children they generate, but without the benefits of necessarily getting to be the fathers of the children or the husbands in a family. They'll still have to pay for it. 

Even Marxists should be able to grasp the economic interest aspect of this set of complaints, since their ideology reduces everything to economics. The Democrats are losing men because they have constructed an ideology that economically disadvantages young men systematically. Rather than the ideological indoctrination making them submissive to this, it has instead created a kind of class consciousness: they know they're being oppressed, and they know whose fault these distortions are. They've been in that education system most of their lives. They are completely familiar with where all this is coming from. They are not fooled; in spite of best efforts, they are not fools. 

Ah, That Makes Sense

Babylon Bee: 

That explains why Maimonides went so far wrong; he never saw Smokey and the Bandit. 

Solipsism and Romance

An essay ponders a truth about literature in the age of AI: whatever meaning an author intended to convey, it is the reader who determines what is actually understood and accepted. Thus, readers have always been in some sense in charge of the meaning of the work regardless of the author. Why not just accept that AI will give them the ability to restructure the text accordingly? 

LLMs may well signal the end of the author, but this isn’t a loss to be lamented. In fact, these machines can be liberating: They free both writers and readers from the authoritarian control and influence of this thing we call the “author.”

By coincidence, the WSJ just published an article about the current state of literature, one that arises precisely from trying to give readers what they want. "What Hot Dragon-Riders and Fornicating Faeries Say About What Women Want Now: ‘Romantasy’ novels are booming when romance in general is in decline."

The “ACOTAR” series, for example, features a romance between a 19-year-old woman and a Fae, or faerie, lord who is around 500 years old (perhaps the age at which a male’s emotional maturity peaks). It is set in a timeless world where the main characters essentially sext each other all day via a magical telepathic bond.... “You always want to know what your partner is thinking,” she explained....

You really don't, but with AI there to rewrite the scene for you -- freeing you from the authoritarian designs of the author -- your partner can always be thinking the exact right thing. Only you can know what that is!

The sex in the genre’s bestselling books is fairly vanilla, but it’s explicit and heavy on female pleasure. Readers can expect a great deal of ornately described oral sex by male lovers... Yet one of the most talked about moments doesn’t involve an orgasm at all: It’s a tender bath scene in Yarros’s “Onyx Storm” in which Xaden, a heavily tattooed “shadow-wielder,” asks Violet, “May I wash your hair?”

Because these scenes always take a woman’s point of view, they are helping female readers reframe “how they understand their own pleasure... As a woman, you know how you want, personally, to be loved,” she said.

It is obvious that these fantasies are further divorcing people from the possibility of a real relationship with an actual human being by raising impossibilities of 'telepathic connection' with someone who is always thinking the right thing, or just wanting to do exactly what you want him to do without you having to tell him (or, therefore, to take responsibility for wanting it). 

The only remaining human connection is that with the author, another woman who shares the reader's basic desires but perhaps not in exactly the same way. The AI can strip that last part out, giving the reader perfect control over the world as if she were the only real person extant in the whole universe. 

I don't want to sound critical of the act of having fantasies, and the world would not be harmed if this whole genre of authors were replaced by automatons. How strange to find romance, of all places, the ground of this sort of solipsism! But as one of those interviewed explained, the real driver in this field is the desire to avoid rejection; one cannot be rejected if there is no one to reject you. So too the concern about consent: there is no danger of anything nonconsensual if there is no other will involved. 

Especially with the AI to rewrite the scenes as many times as it takes to get it just right for you, whatever it says will be just what you wanted, at least at that moment. When you change your mind, you can have it rewrite again, or just start over without consequences for abandoning an existing relationship. 

Is this literature? It might be an opportunity to explore your own inner landscape, as if we were much in need of more opportunities for that. 

Nicomachean Ethics I.5

Let us, however, resume our discussion from the point at which we digressed. To judge from the lives that men lead, most men, and men of the most vulgar type, seem (not without some ground) to identify the good, or happiness, with pleasure; which is the reason why they love the life of enjoyment. For there are, we may say, three prominent types of life- that just mentioned, the political, and thirdly the contemplative life. Now the mass of mankind are evidently quite slavish in their tastes, preferring a life suitable to beasts, but they get some ground for their view from the fact that many of those in high places share the tastes of Sardanapallus. A consideration of the prominent types of life shows that people of superior refinement and of active disposition identify happiness with honour; for this is, roughly speaking, the end of the political life. But it seems too superficial to be what we are looking for, since it is thought to depend on those who bestow honour rather than on him who receives it, but the good we divine to be something proper to a man and not easily taken from him. Further, men seem to pursue honour in order that they may be assured of their goodness; at least it is by men of practical wisdom that they seek to be honoured, and among those who know them, and on the ground of their virtue; clearly, then, according to them, at any rate, virtue is better. And perhaps one might even suppose this to be, rather than honour, the end of the political life. But even this appears somewhat incomplete; for possession of virtue seems actually compatible with being asleep, or with lifelong inactivity, and, further, with the greatest sufferings and misfortunes; but a man who was living so no one would call happy, unless he were maintaining a thesis at all costs. But enough of this; for the subject has been sufficiently treated even in the current discussions. Third comes the contemplative life, which we shall consider later.

The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else. And so one might rather take the aforenamed objects to be ends; for they are loved for themselves. But it is evident that not even these are ends; yet many arguments have been thrown away in support of them. Let us leave this subject, then.

This is a further consideration of the Opinions of the Wise on the subject of 'what is happiness?' Of surprisingly contemporary import is Sardanapallus, who is not especially famous today but was a legend in Aristotle's time. Maybe literally: we don't know that he really existed, and there are some reasons to doubt it. "Diodorus says that Sardanapalus, son of Anakyndaraxes, exceeded all previous rulers in sloth and luxury. He spent his whole life in self-indulgence. He dressed in women's clothes and wore make-up. He had many concubines, female and male. He wrote his own epitaph, which stated that physical gratification is the only purpose of life." That gives you the spirit of the thing Aristotle is criticizing, which we more regularly call hedonism. The life of physical pleasure is not taken seriously as a candidate for happiness, even though 'many in high places' like it. 

Honor, however, is considered a serious candidate. Remembering the importance of a proper upbringing to discussing this, Aristotle notes that "people of superior refinement and active disposition" consider honor to be the end of ethics. Aristotle doesn't quite agree, for two reasons. First, some good men pursue honor to be assured of their goodness, and therefore they must really be seeking goodness (virtue) primarily. 

Second, having honors bestowed upon you by others puts the power and agency in the hand of the others; Aristotle thinks you should seek an end for ethics that is in your own power. 

The mere possession of virtue, meanwhile, doesn't succeed because merely being virtuous is compatible with not doing anything virtuous. You would have been brave had you gone to war or to sea; but you didn't, so your virtue doesn't really come to anything. It is bootless, and therefore inadequate as the ground of a happy life.

We will discover that honor is actually of fundamental importance to ethics and the definition of happiness Aristotle prefers. However, it will prove to be a divining rod to identifying what is best rather than the actual end (telos) of the ethical project. We will get there when we reach the discussion of magnanimity. 

Wealth is pursued never for its own sake, but always for something else, and thus it cannot be the proper end of ethics either. Because you need wealth for these other things, which are more necessary than the wealth itself, the pursuit of wealth is a kind of compulsion -- and it is not a happy life to be always acting under compulsion. Even the things you pursue wealth in order to obtain are not, because these things are also wanted as means to some further end. 

None of these candidates succeed. Even the Wise, and those with good upbringings and who have lived good lives, have not given us the correct answer. (This is quite usual for Aristotle's review of Wise opinion, which usually has failed in a similar way; otherwise, why would he be constructing a new inquiry?)

Nicomachean Ethics I.4

For ease, I am using the W.D. Ross translation that is available on the sidebar (also here). It is not the very best translation. Terence Irwin did a good one about thirty years ago, although it's more difficult to use in some respects because he chose some terms of art (which he then helpfully defines and explains in a glossary). A serious student should probably read more than one and compare them, which we will not be doing here except perhaps in passing. A very serious student should study the Greek well enough to at least engage with the most central concepts. We may do some of that here, as we did with Xenophon etc. 

Let us resume our inquiry and state, in view of the fact that all knowledge and every pursuit aims at some good, what it is that we say political science aims at and what is the highest of all goods achievable by action. Verbally there is very general agreement; for both the general run of men and people of superior refinement say that it is happiness, and identify living well and doing well with being happy; but with regard to what happiness is they differ, and the many do not give the same account as the wise. For the former think it is some plain and obvious thing, like pleasure, wealth, or honour; they differ, however, from one another- and often even the same man identifies it with different things, with health when he is ill, with wealth when he is poor; but, conscious of their ignorance, they admire those who proclaim some great ideal that is above their comprehension. Now some thought that apart from these many goods there is another which is self-subsistent and causes the goodness of all these as well. To examine all the opinions that have been held were perhaps somewhat fruitless; enough to examine those that are most prevalent or that seem to be arguable.

Let us not fail to notice, however, that there is a difference between arguments from and those to the first principles. For Plato, too, was right in raising this question and asking, as he used to do, 'are we on the way from or to the first principles?' There is a difference, as there is in a race-course between the course from the judges to the turning-point and the way back. For, while we must begin with what is known, things are objects of knowledge in two senses- some to us, some without qualification. Presumably, then, we must begin with things known to us. Hence any one who is to listen intelligently to lectures about what is noble and just, and generally, about the subjects of political science must have been brought up in good habits.* For the fact is the starting-point, and if this is sufficiently plain to him, he will not at the start need the reason as well; and the man who has been well brought up has or can easily get starting points. And as for him who neither has nor can get them, let him hear the words of Hesiod:

Far best is he who knows all things himself;

Good, he that hearkens when men counsel right;

But he who neither knows, nor lays to heart

Another's wisdom, is a useless wight.

This 'resuming our inquiry' or 'beginning again' is something that Aristotle likes to do. In Physics I, he lays out a whole system for thinking about how motion is possible and explicable, only to reject it as inadequate and start again with a new approach in Physics II. Yet the inquiry in the first book was worthwhile; without it, you would not have noticed or understood the things that were necessary to the second start. 

Here we are not setting aside the first three parts of the book, but rather framing them as similarly necessary prefaces for the inquiry that can now begin in earnest. You really needed all three of those prefaces to understand what follows. 

Another thing that Aristotle likes to do in the beginning of his inquiries is to give us an account of the opinions of the Wise. This often includes poetics, as here. Sometimes we are told the names of people who held the various opinions, and sometimes not. What he is good about is giving an account of the field he is entering as it stands at the time of his entry. We know what has been thought so far; he will then tell us briefly what is wrong with it, and then begin to try to resolve the problems identified with the existing Wise opinion.

So here we get the first real problem of the Ethics: the Wise say that happiness is the goal of both ethics and political science.** However, they disagree about what 'happiness' entails. So before we can go very far, we have to determine what this happiness is that we are aiming at as our target. 

* Here is an opportunity to engage with one of my own teachers, Professor Iakovos Vasiliou, currently at CUNY. When I knew him he was a young man starting out as a professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta (which, I notice, his biography no longer mentions). He wrote an early paper on the role of the good upbringing that Aristotle mentions in passing here that is a good introduction to the world of students that Aristotle was engaging himself, and to the Greek culture of the time. You should be able to access the text as an independent researcher, if you wish; you can also try Academia.com if JSTOR didn't work for you. 

** It is important to grasp that Aristotle intends these two sciences to have the same end because they are meant to be aligned with each other. A 'science' in ancient Greece is not a modern science, because there was no scientific method like ours; it is, rather, a unified field of study. Ethics is the science of proper behavior for a human being, which is -- we have just learned -- pointed at maximizing human happiness (however that ends up being defined). Political Science is the science of organizing a community of human beings in such a way that they can all best pursue their individual goods, i.e., that very same happiness that is the end of ethics. Politics is supposed to grow out of ethics in this way, and a good politics can be judged from a bad one by whether and to what degree it supports the end of their ethics for the people of the community. 

Nicomachean Ethics I.3

This section is one of the most important parts of the EN to grasp in order to understand the project. I've written about this short section many times in the past. This is where Aristotle grounds his ethical project in reality, in the strongest terms we will ever get until the American pragmatist movement of the 20th century. What makes something a virtue is that it works. 

He wants to be clear from the beginning that he means that a thing works for the most part. Luck and chance can interfere with anything in the real world. It is the mark of a wise man to understand that ethics doesn't admit of logical proofs -- poor Kant -- but of probabilistic arguments based on real-world empirical observation. 

If you don't get this part right you will be out to sea for the rest of the work. 

Our discussion will be adequate if it has as much clearness as the subject-matter admits of, for precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions, any more than in all the products of the crafts. Now fine and just actions, which political science investigates, admit of much variety and fluctuation of opinion, so that they may be thought to exist only by convention, and not by nature. And goods also give rise to a similar fluctuation because they bring harm to many people; for before now men have been undone by reason of their wealth, and others by reason of their courage. We must be content, then, in speaking of such subjects and with such premisses to indicate the truth roughly and in outline, and in speaking about things which are only for the most part true and with premisses of the same kind to reach conclusions that are no better. In the same spirit, therefore, should each type of statement be received; for it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.

Emphasis added. This is not going to be a list of rules; it is not going to be a list of moral principles, even. It is certainly not going to try to be a deduction from logic. We are talking about developing a state of character that is fit for the world you live in. We judge whether a thing is a virtue by whether or not it works, making due allowances for the chance and fate that are also part of the world.

Who judges? Not every man equally.   

Now each man judges well the things he knows, and of these he is a good judge. And so the man who has been educated in a subject is a good judge of that subject, and the man who has received an all-round education is a good judge in general. Hence a young man is not a proper hearer of lectures on political science; for he is inexperienced in the actions that occur in life, but its discussions start from these and are about these; and, further, since he tends to follow his passions, his study will be vain and unprofitable, because the end aimed at is not knowledge but action. And it makes no difference whether he is young in years or youthful in character; the defect does not depend on time, but on his living, and pursuing each successive object, as passion directs. For to such persons, as to the incontinent, knowledge brings no profit; but to those who desire and act in accordance with a rational principle knowledge about such matters will be of great benefit.

These remarks about the student, the sort of treatment to be expected, and the purpose of the inquiry, may be taken as our preface.

It will turn out to be that the virtuous man is the best judge of virtue, for his education is complete. The man who is courageous is a good judge of courage; the man who is just in his treatment of others is a good judge of justice. Not to get too far ahead of ourselves, but both justice and the virtue he calls magnanimity have a claim to be 'complete virtue,' such that a truly just or magnanimous man can be said to have received an all-round education in virtue and to be a good judge in general. They differ in a key aspect, however, which we will discuss when we get there. 

Nicomachean Ethics, I.2

If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this), and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else (for at that rate the process would go on to infinity, so that our desire would be empty and vain), clearly this must be the good and the chief good. Will not the knowledge of it, then, have a great influence on life? Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what is right? If so, we must try, in outline at least, to determine what it is, and of which of the sciences or capacities it is the object. It would seem to belong to the most authoritative art and that which is most truly the master art. And politics appears to be of this nature; for it is this that ordains which of the sciences should be studied in a state, and which each class of citizens should learn and up to what point they should learn them; and we see even the most highly esteemed of capacities to fall under this, e.g. strategy, economics, rhetoric; now, since politics uses the rest of the sciences, and since, again, it legislates as to what we are to do and what we are to abstain from, the end of this science must include those of the others, so that this end must be the good for man. For even if the end is the same for a single man and for a state, that of the state seems at all events something greater and more complete whether to attain or to preserve; though it is worth while to attain the end merely for one man, it is finer and more godlike to attain it for a nation or for city-states. These, then, are the ends at which our inquiry aims, since it is political science, in one sense of that term.

This section is a great example of why it's important to take the introduction slowly. There is a whole lot going on in this short piece of writing, which I have quoted in full.

Aristotle sets aside infinite regress as a possibility. This is more fully argued elsewhere, but it is of great importance -- it is indeed crucial for theology because it proves the existence of God, as Avicenna spells out in his metaphysics. Briefly, you exist obviously; where did you get existence? You got it from your parents, who already existed. Thus, we inherit existence from something that already exists. Avicenna has two arguments, which he inherited from the Greeks, about why this cannot work as an infinite regress. There has to be something that really exists to found the existence of everything else, something that exists necessarily rather than accidentally: and that, Avicenna says, is God. 

For us in this work, we aren't looking for God. We are, however, also needing to ground our desires. Maybe you desire a promotion at work; why? Perhaps because it comes with more money or greater respect, or both; why do you want those things? Perhaps because they could better allow you to attract a mate; why do you want that? Perhaps because.... if this goes on forever, Aristotle is saying, you won't ultimately really want anything at all. But you do want things. Thus, some things need to be desired for themselves. 

There's a lot more we won't get here about how we determine what those things are, and which ones are more valuable. In the Rhetoric, for example, we will learn that when incomparable things are being weighted against each other -- should I prefer this meal, or that victory at war? -- honor provides the common ground for valuation. This is an important concept to the EN (Nicomachean Ethics, for reasons pertaining to Latin, is shortened to EN) that isn't explicit in the EN. When good men sit together and talk about what is most worthy of honor, that is when they find they can in fact compare what seem to be incomparable things. Apples and oranges are comparable in terms of the price assigned to them, but all things are comparable in terms of what degree of honor they merit. The victory is obviously worth more than the meal, even if you are very hungry.

Also in this section we learn that politics is a kind of extension of ethics. This is not obvious, but it is central to Aristotle's approach. Ethics is about how to live well as a human being; politics is about how to structure a society that supports the best kind of life. The value of doing this becomes apparent as we consider the human condition. It is possible to live well in conditions of oppression or tyranny; perhaps some of the very highest things can only be achieved given the opportunity to resist tyranny. (Perhaps that is why very comfortable Americans tend to describe relatively tame matters as tyrannical: they are striving for the greatness that comes from bravely resisting tyranny.) To have a society that is structured to support the good life, though, makes everyone's life better and the best life easier to obtain for everyone. We should want that.

We still have a lot of problems, but the goal is shaping up. In ethics we are trying to shape a life that attains the best qualities that a good person ought to desire in himself or herself; and in politics, therefore, we should be aiming at a society that supports that goal for its citizens. That's what we do want, and it is what we ought to want. 

Arms & White Samite: A Podcast

The interview with me on the subject of my Arthurian book that I mentioned a few days ago is now posted. 

The book, Arms & White Samite, is available free as an etext from the Signum Collaboratory.

Therapy Culture and Childlessness

This article in the NYT gets at something I have long believed: therapy culture has significant costs, here to include childlessness.

[I]t still seems increasingly likely that millennials will have the highest rate of childlessness of any generational cohort in American history.

There are plenty of plausible explanations for the trend.... I suspect there’s some truth in all of these explanations. But I think there’s another reason, too, one that’s often been overlooked. Over the past few decades, Americans have redefined “harm,” “abuse,” “neglect” and “trauma,” expanding those categories to include emotional and relational struggles that were previously considered unavoidable parts of life. Adult children seem increasingly likely to publicly, even righteously, cut off contact with a parent, sometimes citing emotional, physical or sexual abuse they experienced in childhood and sometimes things like clashing values, parental toxicity or feeling misunderstood or unsupported.

This cultural shift has contributed to a new, nearly impossible standard for parenting.... So I want to suggest that there’s another reason my generation dreads parenthood: We’ve held our own parents to unreachable standards, standards that deep down, maybe, we know we ourselves would struggle to meet.

Emphasis added. 

I remember a few years ago hearing a woman I know describe her work as "healing trauma," knowing that her clients were well-to-do women in the suburbs. She and others like her were training them to think of their lives as traumatic, when in fact they were plausibly among the most comfortable lives anyone was living anywhere on Earth or at any time in history.

That can't be healthy.

Nichomachean Ethics, I.1

Tom has asked that we go through Aristotle's most famous work on ethics. This is well worth doing; indeed almost nothing is more worth doing. It will take quite a while, and we will move as slowly as necessary. The first book we will take especially slow.

We probably don't have anything Aristotle wrote. Most likely, what we have are summary notes by students. They are, therefore, dense and surprisingly difficult to understand because a lot is being summarized into each section. The opening sections are often worthy of tremendous deliberation. Physics 1, for example, is extraordinary; but it is apparently entirely set aside by the beginning of Physics 2. The exploration of the first chapter was nevertheless deeply worthwhile.

So we will take our time with it. 

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim. But a certain difference is found among ends; some are activities, others are products apart from the activities that produce them. Where there are ends apart from the actions, it is the nature of the products to be better than the activities. Now, as there are many actions, arts, and sciences, their ends also are many; the end of the medical art is health, that of shipbuilding a vessel, that of strategy victory, that of economics wealth. But where such arts fall under a single capacity- as bridle-making and the other arts concerned with the equipment of horses fall under the art of riding, and this and every military action under strategy, in the same way other arts fall under yet others- in all of these the ends of the master arts are to be preferred to all the subordinate ends; for it is for the sake of the former that the latter are pursued. It makes no difference whether the activities themselves are the ends of the actions, or something else apart from the activities, as in the case of the sciences just mentioned.

A very great deal is being said here. First principle: every thing that we do aims at some good. Seems simple enough: why would we bother doing something that wasn't meant to obtain something good? Rarely do we engage in some activity that doesn't at least bring a passing pleasure; we might eat fried potatoes knowing they are bad for us, but at least they'll make us happy for a little while. 

So, we are aiming at the good, not the bad things that are perhaps necessary consequences. That's important. Often we know bad things are coming too, but we still pursue the goods in spite of the bad. The point is that action is chained to the good that it pursues; the Greek word is telos, meaning the end or goal.

Not all of these ends are equal. Aristotle wants us to discern the more important, or better, from the worse or lesser. Right away he wants us thinking about this. The potatoes aren't that important (indeed no one in Europe in Aristotle's time had heard of potatoes). The first division is in activities versus products that activities can produce. We were just talking about this recently. Walking is an activity; it can produce health. Health is better than walking was. Or it can produce an opportunity to engage in philosophy, talking and thinking as you walk. Philosophy is better than walking alone was. The products to be achieved by the activities are better than the activities alone, at least for us -- a pure activity, like God, maybe is not like we are. That is for the Metaphysics; the Ethics is for us.

Next he has a simple heuristic for trying to judge which of the products is better than other products. It is straightforward: the master art rules. Does it? Say you are a great helicopter pilot, and the product of your art is success in your missions. You are assigned many military missions and you succeed in them. What Aristotle is saying is that the strategist's product -- the one who assigned you the missions to attain some greater goal -- is better than your own product in succeeding in these missions. 

We can see the logic of this. The strategist hasn't done anything as glorious as the man who risked his life in dangerous and successful missions. Yet if the strategist chose the missions wisely, and selected a strategy that would fold them into a greater overall victory, the strategist has attained a greater good. Even though he may never have been in any danger, and spent his life in contemplation rather than in glory, the strategist may ultimately be due greater honor. The pilot executed successful missions, but the strategist won the war. 

Tom says he has guests this weekend, so we will pause and reflect until next week. 

A Plague of Credentials

Our friend Mr. Foster has a post on the dangers of having too many people with credentials aspiring for power. There is a great deal there that I will not excerpt about the perils of a class of status-hungry, educated people. 

The case is actually somewhat worse than he or his sources contemplate. It is not merely the case that we have overproduced candidates for elite positions, far beyond the number of such positions to occupy. The fact is that we have separate classes of elites and would-be elites that are competing for power and control. The present administration is damaging the pipeline for one of these classes by shutting down entities like USAID, hampering Harvard and the Ivys, and so forth. The National Endowment for Democracy continues to survive, protected by Federal judges -- as Harvard hopes to be. Here too are the teachers and public sector unions, and indeed all the Federal agencies. They have been in power for decades, and the attempt to unseat them is uncertain to succeed. 

Over against these are a large number of educated men and women who would like to be in control at least of their own lives and businesses, but that runs into the teeth of the first class' power to regulate and control. These include, of course, Elon Musk and the young men who volunteered for DOGE. It includes the Heritage Foundation and its supporters who wrote Project 2025. They are intentionally and explicitly waging an insurgency against the cemented power of the first class, which is responding by trying to rally and crush them. 

The conflict doesn't really touch most of us except slightly and at the edges. A little more of your wealth may be extracted as taxes if one side wins; as student loan payments or tariff-inflation if the other side does. You will be a little freer either way because they are so busy fighting each other they haven't got time for us anymore: gone are the days when the cemented class could spend its time destroying small-town bakeries for thoughtcrime. Now it's fighting tooth-and-nail for its own survival, and hasn't time to think of us any more.

A Roman Catholic Atheist

This is a good survey of the work and life of Alasdair MacIntyre, who once described himself as a Roman Catholic atheist: "Only the Catholics worshiped a God worth denying."

That didn't last. 

In 1983, he became a Roman Catholic in faith and a Thomist in philosophy, a “result of being convinced of Thomism while attempting to disabuse his students of its authenticity.” What impressed him, in part, was “that Aquinas—to an extent not matched by either Plato or Ayer—does not commit himself to accepting any particular answer to whatever question it is that he is asking, until he has catalogued all the reasonable objections to that answer that he can identify and has found what he takes to be sufficient reason for rejecting each of them. Following his example seems an excellent way of ensuring that I become adequately suspicious of any philosophical theses which I am tempted to accept.” No longer Karl Barth, Alasdair’s favorite twentieth-century theologian became Joseph Ratzinger. 

He also broke up the Beatles, which is good. 

Another Round on the Marx Carousel

In the LA Review of Books, an argument that Marx is newly important to America. It begins with the argument that he has already been good for America, even great for it, by rooting opposition to slavery.

Slavery in the United States had a clarifying effect on Marx’s thought concerning where value comes from. Marx famously declared that “labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded,” because they are the same. Labor is labor, and this remains one of the most important philosophical observations of the last couple centuries....

He disagreed with all impositions on free labor, especially literal shackles. Marx’s abolitionist zeal was a moral position, consistent with his hatred of most forms of hierarchy.... [an] important fact about the early history of Marx in America is that he was known as a popular rabble-rouser among immigrants—the first wave of Marxism in the United States consisted of German “forty-eighter” revolutionaries, who wanted to tear down the European monarchies and dethrone the medieval archbishops but ended up exiled to the New World after the 1848 revolutions, arriving just in time to help decapitate the Slave Power.

It used to be that everyone knew that the core of the abolitionist movement in America was evangelical Christianity's Great Awakening, bolstering an extant Christian abolitionism that was rooted in Quakers like Betsy Ross. Marx may also have been opposed to slavery; good for him, for although more people have been enslaved in his name than freed by it, the actions of subsequent Communists are not his fault. Still, the effect of Marxism on American abolitionism was surely trivial by comparison to the effect of Christian principles.

The author isn't bothered by that, but instead looks forward to an exciting future of youthful Marxism. 

And yet, there is hope in the fourth boom. Hartman, a professor of history at Illinois State University, is one of the rare Gen X Marxists, pilled by the revolutionary politics of rock band Rage Against the Machine.... According to him, “Marx has remained relevant in the United States across more than 150 years because he suggested an alternative perspective on freedom. In a nation long obsessed with the concept, why were so many Americans relatively unfree?”

Young Americans are only being pushed harder by these entrenched historical pressures. Accelerationists argue that worsening material conditions will force people to confront these questions no matter what, and the Right has a clear and bloody answer: it’s also a hapless and stupid one that just so happens to protect power and wealth. The left has a better response, with a liberatory future to win, and it’s rooted in the work of a guy named Karl.

First of all, Rage Against the Machine are quite complete hypocrites, having ridden their vocal Marxism to tremendous capitalistic success and luxury. This seems to be fairly common among Marxists, a fact that ought to cause more thoughtful introspection among them. 

Second, it's remarkable to hear that "the Right has a clear and bloody answer" when the Marxist answer is literally violent revolution. C'mon. 

Finally, I do know some youthful Marxists. Their ideas seem to be inspired as much by Star Trek as by Das Capital. And I agree with them that far: if we can work out how to build the replicators, maybe we don't need money any more and everyone can just ask for what they want for free. Maybe; but show me a replicator first. Until then, it's just another Marxist fantasy: like Cuba was, like China was, like the once-glorious Soviet Union. 

A Duty to Die

Just yesterday, remarking on a French 'right to die' law, Glenn Reynolds quipped that the right to die somehow always turns into 'a duty to be killed.' 

Now comes no less an elite thinker than Francis Fukuyama of "End of History" fame to advocate for that duty explicitly. 

Among the cognitive debilities that occur over time is rigidity in one’s fundamental outlook and assumptions about life. One’s outlook is usually set relatively early in life; usually by early adulthood you are either a liberal or a conservative; a nationalist or an internationalist; a risk-taker or someone habitually fearful and cautious. There is a lot of happy talk among gerontologists about how people can remain open to new ideas and able to reinvent their lives late in life, and that certainly happens with some individuals. But the truth of the matter is that fundamental change in mental outlooks becomes much less likely with age.

The slowing of generational turnover is thus very likely to slow the rate of social evolution and adaptation, in line with the old joke that the field of economics advances one funeral at a time.

He does have some positive words for increasing immigration as an alternative source of social change. 

We talk about natural rights, but the right to die is the only one that nature itself will not merely defend but resolutely enforce. There's no reason to get in a rush about it: everyone will get his turn. 

Two American Stereotypes

As celebrated by two Americana acts. The first is a contemporary model.

The second is a classic.

Riding around the country these last few days, eating truck stop chow and enjoying the freedom of the highways has put me in the mood for this kind of  Americana. 

The greatest truck stop I know is at Steele's Tavern, Virginia, for those of you who like such things. That's clearly not what the town wants to be known for, I gather, because they don't even mention the place on their website. No accounting for taste. 

Very Careful Vetting

In the Pentagon parking lot, while waiting for the ride to begin, I ran into an old friend who had told me some months ago that he had been tapped to serve in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. I wasn't too surprised, as he had been a Presidential appointee in the first Trump administration too. I asked him how it was going.

"I'm not going in after all," he said. "They tell me I can't pass vetting."

Now, it's good to vet people. However, I have no idea what could possibly be behind this. This guy is a retired Army officer decorated with a Bronze Star for service in Iraq. To my certain knowledge he has possessed a TOP SECRET clearance with SCI designation and been read into extremely sensitive classified war plans. He worked on both Trump campaigns, has met the President many times and been invited to Mar a Largo, and as mentioned was personally appointed by President Trump to serve in a high role in the first administration. His finances are fine; he owns his own home and several nice cars and motorcycles. 

All I can figure is that they're running 'vetting' through Twitter influencers now, and they can't vouch for him because he doesn't have an "X" account. That's not ideal.