cover
Vintage

Contents

Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Edith Hall
Timeline
Map: Places where Aristotle lived
Dedication
Title Page
Introduction
Happiness
Potential
Decisions
Communication
Self-knowledge
Intentions
Love
Community
Leisure
Mortality
Notes
Glossary
Acknowledgments
Further Reading
Index
Copyright

About the Book

What do you and an ancient philosopher have in common? It turns out much more than you might think…

Aristotle was an extraordinary thinker, perhaps the greatest in history. Yet he was preoccupied by an ordinary question: how to be happy. His deepest belief was that we can all be happy in a meaningful, sustained way – and he led by example.

In this handbook to his timeless teachings, Professor Edith Hall shows how ancient thinking is precisely what we need today, even if you don’t know your Odyssey from your Iliad. In ten practical lessons we come to understand more about our own characters and how to make good decisions. We learn how to do well in an interview, how to choose a partner and life-long friends, and how to face death or bereavement.

Life deals the same challenges – in Ancient Greece or the modern world. Aristotle’s way is not to apply rules – it’s about engaging with the texture of existence, and striding purposefully towards a life well lived.

This is advice that won’t go out of fashion.

About the Author

Edith Hall first encountered Aristotle when she was twenty, and he changed her life forever. Now one of Britain’s foremost classicists, and a Professor at King’s College London, she is the first woman to have won the Erasmus Medal of the European Academy. In 2017 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Athens University, just a few streets away from Aristotle’s own Lyceum.

She is the author of several books, including Introducing the Ancient Greeks. She lives with her family in Cambridgeshire.

 

Also by Edith Hall

The Ancient Greeks: Ten Ways They Shaped the Modern World

Timeline (all dates BCE)

384Aristotle is born in Stageira to Nicomachus and Phaestis.
c.372Aristotle’s father dies and he is adopted by Proxenus of Atarneus.
c.367Aristotle moves to Athens to study at Plato’s Academy.
348Philip II of Macedon destroys Stageira but rebuilds it on Aristotle’s request.
347Aristotle leaves Athens when Plato dies and joins Hermias, ruler of Assos.
345–344Aristotle conducts zoological research on Lesbos.
343Philip II invites Aristotle to teach his son Alexander in Macedon.
338–336Aristotle may have spent time in Epirus and Illyria.
336Philip II is assassinated and Alexander becomes King Alexander III (‘the Great’). Aristotle moves to Athens and founds his Lyceum.
323Alexander III dies in Babylon.
322Aristotle is prosecuted for impiety at Athens and moves to Chalkis, where he dies.
Aristotle’s Way Map
Map showing in bold places where Aristotle lived. The dotted areas indicate the Greek-speaking world of the fourth century BCE.

This book is dedicated to the memory of Aristotle the Stageirite, son of Nicomachus and Phaestis

Title page for Aristotle’s Way

Introduction

THE WORDS ‘HAPPY’ and ‘Happiness’ work hard. You can buy a Happy Meal, or drink a cheap cocktail during happy hour. You can pop ‘happy pills’ to improve your mood or post a ‘happy’ emoji on social media. We value happiness highly. Singer Pharrell Williams’ song ‘Happy’ was number one and the bestselling song of 2014 in the United States, as well as twenty-three other countries. Happiness, according to Williams, was a transitory moment of elation, or feeling like a hot-air balloon.

Yet we are confused about happiness. Almost everyone believes that they want to be happy, which usually means a lasting psychological state of contentment (despite what Williams sings). If you tell your children that you ‘just want them to be happy’, you mean permanently. Paradoxically, in our everyday conversations, happiness far more often refers to the trivial and temporary glee of a meal, cocktail, email message. Or, as Lucy in the Peanuts comic strip put it after hugging Snoopy, an encounter with ‘a warm puppy’. A ‘happy birthday’ is a few hours of enjoyment to celebrate the anniversary of your birth.

What if happiness were a lifelong state of being? Philosophers are divided into two main camps about what that would actually mean. On one side, happiness is objective, and can be appreciated, even evaluated, by an onlooker or historian. It means having, for example, good health, longevity, a loving family, freedom from financial problems or anxiety. According to this definition, Queen Victoria, who lived to over eighty, gave birth to nine children who survived into adulthood and was admired around the world, had a clearly ‘happy’ life. But Marie Antoinette was clearly ‘unhappy’: two of her four children died in infancy, she was reviled by her people and executed while still in her thirties.

Most books about happiness refer to this objective ‘well-being’ definition, as do the studies set up by governments to measure the happiness of their citizens on an international scale. Since 2013, on 20 March every year the United Nations has celebrated the International Day of Happiness, which seeks to promote measurable happiness by ending poverty, reducing inequality and protecting the planet.

But on the other side are philosophers who reject this, and instead understand happiness subjectively. To them, happiness is not akin to ‘well-being’ but to ‘contentment’ or ‘felicity’. According to this view, no onlooker can know if someone is happy or not, and it is possible that the most outwardly boisterous person might be suffering from deep melancholy. This subjective happiness can be described, but not measured. We cannot assess whether Marie Antoinette or Queen Victoria was happier for a greater proportion of her time alive. Perhaps Marie Antoinette enjoyed long hours of intense gratification, and Victoria never did, having been widowed early and having lived for years in seclusion.

Aristotle was the first philosopher to enquire into this second kind of subjective happiness. He developed a sophisticated, humane programme for becoming a happy person, and it remains valid to this day. Aristotle provides everything you need to avoid the realisation of the dying protagonist of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), that he has wasted much of his life scaling the social ladder, and putting self-interest above compassion and community values, all the while married to a woman he dislikes. Facing his imminent death, he hates his closest family members, who won’t even talk to him about it. Aristotelian ethics encompass everything modern thinkers associate with subjective happiness: self-realisation, finding ‘a meaning’, and the ‘flow’ of creative involvement with life, or ‘positive emotion’.1

This book presents Aristotle’s time-honoured ethics in contemporary language. It applies Aristotle’s lessons to several practical real-life challenges: decision-making, writing a job application, communicating in an interview, using Aristotle’s chart of Virtues and Vices to analyse your own character, resisting temptation, and choosing friends and partners.

Wherever you are in life, Aristotle’s ideas can make you happier. Few philosophers, mystics, psychologists, or sociologists have ever done much more than restate his fundamental perceptions. But he stated them first, better, more clearly, and in a more holistic way than anyone subsequently. Each part of his prescription for being happy relates to a different phase of human life, but also intersects with all the others.

Becoming subjectively happy as an individual, Aristotle insisted, is your unique and momentous responsibility. It is also a great gift – it is within most people’s power, regardless of their circumstances, to decide to become happier. But understanding happiness as an internal, personal state is still ambiguous. What is happiness, then? Modern philosophers come at subjective happiness from three different directions.

The first approach is connected with psychology and psychiatric medicine, and suggests that happiness is the opposite of depression, a private emotional state experienced as a continuous sequence of moods. It involves a positive, upbeat attitude. It could, theoretically, be enjoyed by someone without aspirations, who sat watching television all day every day, but felt permanently in good spirits. This might be a matter of temperament, perhaps inherited (a cheerful disposition does seem to run in families). According to some eastern philosophies, this emotional state can be cultivated by techniques like transcendental meditation. Western philosophers speculate it may even be related to naturally high levels of the chemical serotonin, the neurotransmitter many physicians and psychiatrists believe is crucial to the maintenance of mood balance, and which is deficient in depressed people. A buoyant disposition is enviable, but many of us are not born with it. Modern antidepressants, which can benefit people either in temporary grief in reaction to life events, or suffering from ‘endogenous’, persistent depression, mostly enhance the levels of serotonin. But is a cheerful outlook happiness? Can a life spent watching television qualify as happiness? Aristotle, for whom happiness required the fulfilment of human potentialities, would have said no. John F. Kennedy summed up Aristotelian happiness in a single sentence: ‘The full use of your powers along lines of excellence in a life affording scope.’

The second contemporary philosophical approach to subjective happiness is ‘hedonism’ – the idea that happiness is defined by the total proportion of our lives we spend enjoying ourselves, experiencing pleasure, or feeling delight and ecstasy. Hedonism (the word comes from hedone, the ancient Greek word for ‘pleasure’) has ancient roots. The Indian school of philosophy known as Charvaka, founded in the sixth century BCE, espoused the view that ‘the enjoyment of heaven lies in eating delicious food, keeping company of young women, using fine clothes, perfumes, garlands, sandal paste. A fool wears himself out by penances and fasts.’2 A century later, one of Socrates’ students, Aristippus from Cyrene in North Africa, developed a system of ethics called ‘hedonistic egoism’. He wrote a book On Ancient Luxury about the exploits of pleasure-seeking philosophers. Aristippus averred that everyone should experience as much physical and sensory pleasure as soon as possible, without concern for the consequences.

Hedonism became fashionable again when the utilitarians, beginning with Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), argued that the correct basis for moral decisions and action was whatever would achieve the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Bentham believed that this principle could help in the creation of laws. In his 1789 manifesto, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, he actually designed an algorithm for quantitative hedonism, to measure the total pleasure quotient produced by any given action. The algorithm is often called the ‘hedonic calculus’. Bentham laid out the variables: how intense is the pleasure? How long will it last? Is it an inevitable or only possible result of the action I am considering? How soon will it happen? Will it be productive and give rise to further pleasure? Will it guarantee no painful consequences? How many people will experience it?

Bentham was interested in the total amount, rather than the type of pleasure. Quantity not quality. If film actor Errol Flynn was telling the truth about his mental experience in his dying words – ‘I’ve had a hell of a lot of fun and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it’, reportedly – then according to the quantitative hedonist, he had been a very happy man indeed.

But what did Errol Flynn mean by ‘fun’ and ‘enjoyment’? For Bentham’s disciple, John Stuart Mill, ‘quantitative hedonism’ did not distinguish human happiness from the happiness of pigs, which could be provided with incessant physical pleasures. So Mill introduced the idea that there were different levels and types of pleasure. Bodily pleasures that we share with animals, such as the pleasure we gain from eating or sex, are ‘lower’ pleasures. Mental pleasures, such those we derive from the arts, intellectual debate or good behaviour, are ‘higher’ and more valuable. This version of hedonist philosophical theory is usually called prudential hedonism or qualitative hedonism.

Few twenty-first-century philosophers advocate hedonistic approaches to achieving subjective happiness. The theory was dealt a severe blow in 1974 when Harvard professor Robert Nozick published Anarchy, State, and Utopia, in which he envisioned a machine capable of giving people continuous pleasurable experiences throughout their lives. These people would not be able to differentiate these simulated machine experiences from ‘real life’. Would anyone choose to be hooked up to the machine? No. We want reality. Therefore, logically speaking, people do not regard favourable sensations as the exclusive determining factor in overall subjective happiness.

Nozick was writing just before the dawn of the age of mass ownership of computers and the idea of virtual reality. His thought experiment grabbed the public imagination, and was associated with the ‘Orgasmatron’ machine in Woody Allen’s movie Sleeper (1973). Maybe a day will come when most humans would opt for the certainty of perpetual simulated delight over the risky business of lived experience, but not yet. We want to be happy, and seem to believe that happiness consists of more than just favourable experiences. It requires doing something more sustained, meaningful, or constructive. This something is what, long ago in classical Greece, Aristotle was interested in. He thought happiness was a psychological state, a sense of fulfilment and satisfaction about your conduct, your interactions and the way your life is going. It implies some element of activity and goal-directedness. This, rather than the positive-mood or hedonist approach, is the third modern philosophical approach to subjective happiness. It is a philosophical approach based on analysing and modifying your own ambitions, behaviour and responses to the world. It comes directly from Aristotle.

Aristotle believed that if you train yourself to be good, by working on your virtues and controlling your vices, you will discover that a happy state of mind comes from habitually doing the right thing. If you begin deliberately to smile in a welcoming way every time your child approaches, you start doing it unconsciously. Some philosophers question whether a virtuous way of life is more desirable than its opposite. But ‘virtue ethics’ have been rehabilitated in philosophical circles of late, and accepted as beneficial. Aristotle saw all virtues as part of an integrated bundle, but recent thinkers have tended to divide them into subcategories. James Wallace, in Virtues and Vices (1978), describes three different groups: self-discipline virtues, such as courage and patience; conscientiousness virtues, such as honesty and fairness; and virtues entailing benevolence towards others, such as kindness and compassion. The first two virtues can favourably influence the success of the individual’s projects and of the whole community. Benevolence virtues are less clear-cut, but they can increase your liking for yourself and everyone else around you. So virtue has extrinsic benefits: you are more likely to be happy if those around you are happy, and thus it is in your enlightened self-interest to be virtuous. But Aristotle, along with Socrates, the Stoics and Victorian philosopher Thomas Hill Green, believed it also had direct intrinsic benefits. Virtues directed towards other people make a constitutive contribution to your own happiness.3

In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle discusses the cause of happiness. If it is not god-sent, he says (and Aristotle did not believe that gods involve themselves in human affairs), ‘then it comes as the result of a goodness, along with a learning process, and effort’. The constituents of happiness can be described and analysed, like the subject matter in any other branch of knowledge, such as astronomy or biology. But this process of studying happiness is different from those sciences because it has a precise goal: the achievement of happiness, which makes it more like medicine, or like political theory.

Moreover, says Aristotle, happiness could potentially be widespread, ‘since it can be attained through some process of study or effort by all persons whose capacity for virtue has not been damaged’. Aristotle knows that the capacity for goodness can be damaged by certain circumstances and life events. But for the majority of people, happiness is indeed available if they decide to apply themselves to its creation. Almost anyone can decide to think herself into happiness. This is not just something for a tiny minority of people with a degree in philosophy.

‘Almost’ is a key word here, of course. He is not offering a magic wand to erase all threats to happiness. There are indeed some qualifications to the universal capacity for pursuing happiness. Aristotle accepts that there are certain kinds of advantage which you either have or you don’t. If you have the bad luck to have been born very low down the socio-economic ladder, or have no children or other family or loved one, or are extremely ugly, your circumstances, which you can’t avoid, as he puts it, ‘taint’ delight. It is harder to achieve happiness. But not impossible. You do not need material possessions or physical strength or beauty to start exercising your mind in company with Aristotle, since the way of life he advocates concerns a moral and psychological excellence rather than one that lies in material possessions or bodily splendour. There are also more difficult obstacles: having children or friends who are completely depraved is one such obstacle. Another – which Aristotle saves until last and elsewhere implies is the most difficult problem any human can ever face – is the loss of fine friends in whom you have invested effort, and especially of children, through death.

Yet, potentially, even people poorly endowed by nature or who have experienced terrible bereavements can live a good life, walking on the virtuous side. ‘This sort of philosophy, which everyone can do, is different from most other types of philosophy’, Aristotle explains, since it has a hands-on aim in real, daily life: Ethics, he adds, ‘unlike the other branches of philosophy, has a practical aim. For we are not investigating the nature of being a good person for the sake of knowing what it is, but in order that we may become good, without which result our investigation would be of no use.’ In fact, the only way to be a good person is to do good things. You have to treat people with fairness repeatedly. You need to offer cheerfully to share fifty-fifty the weekend childcare with your co-parent and always pay your domestic cleaner in full if you cancel her session. Aristotle thinks many people imagine that talking about good behaviour is enough: rather than ‘doing good acts, they instead just discuss what goodness is, and imagine that they are pursuing philosophy and that this will make them good people’. He compares such people with ‘invalids who listen carefully to what the doctor says, but entirely neglect to carry out his prescriptions’.

Thinking as Aristotelians means using our understanding of human nature in order to live in the best way possible. It means that nature, rather than a concept beyond nature – such as god or gods – is the fundamental basis of our analysis of our affairs and our decisions. This was the single most important difference between Aristotle and his teacher, Plato, who believed that humans needed to find answers to the problems of existence in an invisible world of intangible ideas or essential ‘Forms’ beyond the material world they could see. Aristotle, however, focused on the thrilling phenomena in our perceptible here-and-now, as the poet and classicist Louis MacNeice wrote in Autumn Journal, canto 12:

Aristotle was better who watched the insect breed,

The natural world develop,

Stressing the function, scrapping the Form in Itself,

Taking the horse from the shelf and letting it gallop.

Aristotle put human experience at the centre of all his thought. Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx and James Joyce all deeply admired him for this. Modern philosophers, including some outstanding women born in the twentieth century – Hannah Arendt, Philippa Foot, Martha Nussbaum, Sarah Broadie and Charlotte Witt – have written important works deeply influenced by, or devoted to, Aristotle.

Aristotle insists that creating happiness is not a matter of fanatically applying big rules and principles, but of engaging with the texture of life, in every situation, with every galloping horse, as we meet its particularity. There are general guides; just as in medicine or navigation, the doctor or the captain will be equipped with knowledge of certain principles, but every single patient and every single voyage will present slightly different problems, which call for different solutions.

In your own life, as a moral agent you ‘have to consider what is suited to the circumstances on each occasion’. There will be weekends when you need to do all the childcare, or none of it. It is not just a matter of each occasion being different: every individual is different, and being a good person through daily acts will vary from individual to individual. Aristotle here uses the analogy of some athletes needing bigger portions of food than others. He cites Milo of Croton, the most famous wrestling champion Greece ever produced, as an example of a big eater. Each of us needs to acquire self-knowledge and decide what sort of ethical sustenance we need to provide for ourselves. Is it offering help, relinquishing grudges, learning to apologise, or something else entirely?

I don’t think I’m exceptionally worthy or nice. I struggle with some unpleasant character traits. After reading Aristotle on virtues and vices, and talking honestly with people I trust, I believe my own worst faults are: impatience, recklessness, excessive bluntness, emotional extremes and vindictiveness. But Aristotle’s idea of the ideal mean between extremes, which we call ‘the golden mean’, explains that all these are fine in moderation – people who are never impatient don’t get things done; people who never take risks live limited lives; people who evade the truth and do not express pain or joy at all are psychologically and emotionally stunted or deprived; and people who have no desire whatsoever to get even with those who have damaged them are either deluding themselves or have too low an estimate of their own worth.

Evil abounds in the world. We all know, or hear about, people and groups who do seem to be addicted, or at least habituated, to committing bad acts and hurting others. But most of us remain passably convinced that a substantial proportion of human beings, if given sufficient basic resources not to be forced to be selfish in order to survive, enjoy being benevolent and socially interconnected. They feel good when they help other people. Living cooperatively in association with other people, in families and communities, seems to be the natural desire and state of the human being. The hallmarks of an Aristotelian thinker are living in these social groups, thinking rationally, making moral choices, using wholesome pleasure as a guide to what is good, and fostering happiness in self and others.

Other ancient philosophical systems have found advocates in modern times, especially the Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and Epictetus. But Stoicism does not encourage the same joie de vivre as Aristotle’s ethics. It is a rather pessimistic and grim affair. It requires the suppression of emotions and physical appetites. It recommends the resigned acceptance of misfortune, rather than active, practical engagement with the fascinating fine-grained business of everyday living and problem-solving. It doesn’t leave enough room for hope, human agency or human intolerance of misery. It denounces pleasure for its own sake. It is tempting to agree with Cicero, who asked, ‘What? Could a Stoic arouse enthusiasm? He will rather immediately drown any enthusiasm even if he received someone full of zeal.’

Aristotle wrote for people energetically involved in their communities. The Epicureans encouraged people to renounce all ambition for power, fame and fortune and to live a life as free of disturbance as possible. The Sceptics, although sharing with Aristotelians the conviction that we must challenge all assumptions, were sure that true knowledge is impossible and claimed that setting out general principles for living a constructive life, lived together, was impossible. The Cynics agreed with Aristotle that humans were advanced animals, and that the goal of life was happiness, attainable through reason. But the route they recommended was more unconventional: happiness could be achieved through asceticism, by renouncing domesticity, material possessions and ambition for social rewards such as fame, power and wealth. The most famous Cynic, Diogenes (an older contemporary of Aristotle well known at Plato’s Academy), lived semi-naked out of doors. He had neither wife nor household, and renounced any involvement in society. Many of us long for a simpler world, but few want to abolish the family and the state and become isolated vagrants.

Although Aristotle was not himself religious in any conventional way, he lived in a culture which practised a religion to which nobody today adheres, and hundreds of years before Christianity and Islam were even invented. This means that his thought is not affiliated with any contemporary political or ideological camps. Over the centuries he has in fact inspired philosophers alike from Christian, Jewish and Muslim backgrounds, and more recently Hindus, Buddhists and Confucians. Aristotle is the exclusive property of no contemporary intellectual or cultural tradition. There is comfort in a dialogue with a human mind from so long ago, because it makes you realise how little has changed about the human condition, despite all our supposed technological advances. It makes you feel part of a continuing human club and supported in a way that succeeds in transcending human mortality and time. Some philosophers since Hume and Kant have questioned the idea that human nature is useful in ethics, since human culture has varied so widely, and individuals even within communities are temperamentally different. But Aristotle describes an astonishingly constant set of human ethical problems. When he uses the pronoun ‘we’, he often means the entire human race as a collective, past, present and future. In one of the most resonant passages in his Metaphysics, he criticises the mythical, unscientific accounts of the origins of the universe given by the earlier Greek poets such as Hesiod. He says that Hesiod and the other cosmologists ‘gave no consideration to us. For they make the first principles gods or generated from gods, and say that whatever did not taste of the nectar and ambrosia became mortal.’ Instead of thinking about ‘us’, the human race, the earlier cosmologists had thought about ‘them’, the privileged deities, to whom ‘we’ were merely an afterthought.

When you read Aristotle describing people who are mean with money, or quick to anger, you see all-too-recognisable human types who behave just the same today. He is also a fine role model for people at almost any time of life. Not only did he make a success of his own life, family and friendships, but he even managed to survive the most turbulent political events to achieve his personal ambition, after half a century of waiting and preparation, of founding an independent university and getting most of his ideas down on papyrus.

Aristotle was born into a medical family in Stageira, a small, independent Greek city-state, in 384 BCE. Stageira is perched on the twin peaks of a craggy peninsula jutting into the northern Aegean. His father Nicomachus was a doctor, and seems to have excelled at his profession; he was hired as personal physician by the then king of Macedon, Amyntas III. But Aristotle’s childhood was disrupted. Both his father and mother died when he was about thirteen years old, against a backdrop of ever-increasing military strife in the Greek-speaking world. He succeeded in behaving ethically in a time and a place where standards of moral conduct were often shockingly low. He turned the problem into an opportunity, and spent much of his life refining his findings. A man named Proxenus, who was married to Aristotle’s sister, took the boy into his own family and took charge of his education.

In his seventeenth year, Aristotle moved to Athens and enrolled in Plato’s Academy. After two decades, when Plato died, he accepted the invitation of Hermias, ruler of a kingdom based at two cities in north-west Asia Minor, Atarneus and Assos. He later sealed the friendship by marrying Hermias’ daughter Pythias. At around the age of forty, Aristotle sailed to the island of Lesbos, where he conducted the research into wildlife which enabled him to found the discipline of zoology. But everything changed in 343 BCE, when he was summoned by Philip II to Macedon to teach Philip’s young son Alexander, later to become known as Alexander the Great. Philip had a school built for Aristotle at a sanctuary of the nymphs – which means somewhere with a freshwater spring – in a spectacular, verdant valley at Mieza, thirty miles south of the Macedonian capital at Pella. The international political situation became explosive as Philip expanded the Macedonian Empire, and Aristotle may have spent 338–336 BCE, when Philip was assassinated and Alexander became king, keeping a low profile in Epirus and Illyria (the western Balkans).

At nearly fifty years old, Aristotle grasped his opportunity. He did not accompany Alexander on his campaign to the east, despite what is claimed to have happened in Robert Rossen’s epic movie Alexander the Great (1956) starring Richard Burton. He was not a young man and he had been at the beck and call of others – whether Plato as the head of the Academy or his rich royal patrons Hermias and Philip – since he was a teenager. His time had come. He arrived in Athens and founded his Lyceum, the first research and teaching university in the world. Although he had been writing and thinking since his teens, most scholars think that it was only in the golden twelve years of his mature life as the head of the Lyceum that he wrote the treatises which survive, in addition to all the others – at least 130 – which do not. One which has sadly been lost is the second book of his Poetics. (Just what a loss this has been to world culture was best illustrated by Umberto Eco’s 1980 medieval detective story The Name of the Rose, made into a film starring Sean Connery in 1986. At the climax of both book and film, the last surviving manuscript copy of Aristotle’s thoughts on comedy are destroyed in a blaze started by a monk who believed all laughter to be sinful. Eco’s idea here may actually reflect the true reason why this precious work was not transmitted to the modern world; any writings on comic theatre were far less likely to be copied out in medieval Christian monasteries than, for example, those on logic or moral philosophy.)

*

Although he is often characterised as an austere, uncompromising and arduous writer, there are dozens of moments in Aristotle’s surviving works which come suddenly and compellingly to life. He is quietly humorous, and observes human foibles with a real twinkle in his eye. At a party drinking with philosophers, for example, he encountered a man who comically repeated the maxims of Empedocles – one of the more obscure Greek thinkers, who expressed his views in lengthy hexameter poems. Aristotle knew many poets personally, and found that they tended to be obsessed with their own literary creations, ‘adoring them as parents adore their children’. He loved anecdotes illustrating harmless human eccentricity; for example, the story of a man in Byzantium who became an expert weather forecaster by observing the northerly or southerly walking directions of his pet hedgehogs, or the toper from Syracuse who kept the eggs his chickens laid warm until they hatched by sitting over them and partying with a continuous supply of wine.

Aristotle cared about his relationship to his body. He believed profoundly that sex, food and wine, enjoyed in constructive ways with people we love, offer crucial clues to human happiness. He was fascinated by the sensation of taste, by food and cooking; he knew what people grew to eat in domestic gardens. He enjoyed a rub-down and a warm bath in the gymnasium. The amount he knew about music and indeed about the practicalities of learning instruments suggests that this was an important aspect of his life. His usually measured tone evanesces entirely when he talks about the self-willed but irresponsible women of Sparta, suggesting he experienced a difficult relationship with one. He was a father and an uncle, and described the type of gift people make to children – a ball, or a personal oil-flask, for example.

Yet the treatises, based on his own research and the lecture notes he used in teaching his students, are often dense and strenuous, even in the most up-to-date and sympathetic translations. But he gave a great deal of thought to the difference between the way a philosopher or scientist needed to address the general public and a trained academic audience, and was convinced of the equal status of both styles of discourse. Far from looking down on ‘popularising’ works, Aristotle actually wrote many himself. We know that he wrote and delivered a different kind of lecture to public audiences, known in antiquity as his exoteric works (‘exoteric’ just means ‘outward-facing’ or ‘designed for the public’). These works were almost certainly in the accessible, readable dialogue form which Plato had popularised. Aristotle himself appears as a discussant in his dialogues, just as Socrates appears in the philosophical dialogues of Plato and Xenophon. Cicero, who knew all there was to know about literary style, said that Aristotle’s public talks were written ‘in a popular way’ (populariter), and was almost certainly thinking of them when he said that Aristotle’s prose flowed ‘like a river of gold’. The most famous of all his exoteric works was his Protrepticus, or Encouragement to Philosophy. This was a popular classic of philosophy for ‘everyman’; a philosopher named Crates came across it one day ‘as he sat in a shoemaker’s workshop’ and read it all in one go. The text expresses Aristotle’s passion for philosophy, and describes what differentiates humans most from other animals: the sheer power of the human mind. It also brings them closest to what Aristotle simply called ‘god’ – although the Greeks worshipped many gods, philosophers had a concept of a unitary higher divine power which ultimately motored the universe. And the few surviving fragments of the Protrepticus include phrases stressing how much fun it can be. ‘It is pleasant to sit down and get on with it.’

But, in any attempt to revive Aristotelian philosophy, especially for a woman there is the contentious issue of his prejudice, as a prosperous ancient patriarch and householder, towards women and slaves. In the first book of Politics, he notoriously defends slavery, at least in the case of Greeks enslaving non-Greeks, and states unequivocally that women are cerebrally inferior to men. I have not dwelt on the (actually extremely infrequent) passages where he reveals his error in thinking that women or non-Greek slaves were not born with the same intellectual potential as Greek men.4 Instead, I stress Aristotle’s consistency in arguing that all opinions must always be open to revision.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, for example, he writes that even though steadfastness is essentially a virtue, there are times when it can be damaging to adhere too rigidly to fixed opinions. If you receive incontrovertible evidence that your opinion is wrong, then changing your mind, which some people might condemn as inconstancy, is worthy of high praise. As often, he shows how deeply he thought about the ethical examples portrayed in tragedy. He cites the case of Neoptolemus in the Philoctetes of Sophocles. Neoptolemus had been persuaded by Odysseus to lie to the lame Philoctetes, but when he sees Philoctetes’ suffering and learns more information about his plight, he changes his mind and refuses to participate in the deception. He revises his opinion. I like to think that if we could talk to Aristotle, we could persuade him to revise his opinion of the female brain.

Although he thinks traditional opinions (endoxa) need to be taken seriously, and if necessary refuted systematically, Aristotle has little time for the argument that something is good just because it is inherited from our ancestors. He believes that primitive humans were just like the less sophisticated people in his own day, ‘so that it is odd that we should abide by their notions’. He thinks that written codes of law can also be revised to advantage, ‘because it is impossible that the structure of the state can have been framed correctly for all time in relation to all its details’.

The traditional name for Aristotle’s school of thought is Peripatetic philosophy. The word ‘Peripatetic’ comes from the verb peripateo, which in Greek, both ancient and modern, means ‘I go for a walk’. Like his teacher Plato, and Plato’s teacher Socrates before him, Aristotle liked to walk as he reflected; so have many important philosophers since, including Nietzsche, who insisted that ‘only ideas gained through walking have any worth at all’. But the ancient Greeks would have been puzzled by the romantic figure of the lone wandering sage first celebrated in Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1778). They preferred to perambulate in company, harnessing the forward drive their energetic strides generated to the cause of intellectual progress, synchronising their dialogue to the rhythm of their paces. To judge from the magnitude of his contribution to human thinking, and the number of seminal books he produced, Aristotle must have tramped thousands of miles with his students across craggy Greek landscapes during his sixty-two years on the planet.

There was an intimate connection in ancient Greek thought between intellectual enquiry and the idea of the journey. This association stretches far back in time beyond Aristotle to the opening of Homer’s Odyssey, where Odysseus’ wanderings allow him to visit the lands of many different peoples ‘and learn about their minds’. By the classical period, it was metaphorically possible to take a concept or idea ‘for a walk’: in a comedy first produced in Athens about twenty years before Aristotle was born, the tragedian Euripides is advised against ‘walking’ a tendentious claim he can never substantiate. And a medical text attributed to the physician Hippocrates equates the act of thinking with taking your mind out for a walk in order to exercise it: ‘for human beings, thought is a walk for the soul’.

Aristotle used this metaphor when he began his own pioneering enquiry into the nature of human consciousness in On the Soul. He says there that we need to look at the opinions of earlier thinkers if we hope ‘to move forward as we try find the necessary direct pathways through impasses’: the stem word here for a ‘pathway through’ is a poros, which can mean a bridge, ford, route through ravines, or passageway through narrow straits, deserts and woods. He opens his enquiry into nature in his Physics with a similar invitation to us to take not just to the path but to the highway with him: the road (hodos) of investigation needs to set out from things which are familiar and progress towards things which are harder for us to understand.

The standard term for a philosophical problem was an aporia, ‘an impassable place’. But the name ‘Peripatetic’ stuck to Aristotle’s philosophy for two reasons. First, his entire intellectual system is grounded in an enthusiasm for the granular, tactile detail of the physical world around us. Aristotle was an empirical natural scientist as well as a philosopher of mind, and his writing constantly celebrates the materiality of the universe we can perceive through our senses and know is real. His biological works suggest a picture of a man pausing every few minutes as he walked, to pick up a seashell, point out a plant, or call a pause in dialectic to listen to the nightingales. Second, Aristotle, far from despising the human body as Plato had done, regarded humans as wonderfully gifted animals, whose consciousness was inseparable from their organic being, whose hands were miracles of mechanical engineering, and for whom instinctual physical pleasure was a true guide to living a life of virtue and happiness. As we read Aristotle, we are aware that he is using his own adept hand to inscribe on papyrus the thoughts that have emerged from his active brain, part of his well-exercised, well-loved body.

But there is just one more association of the term ‘Peripatetic’. The Greek text of the Gospel of Matthew tells us that when the Pharisees asked Jesus of Nazareth why his disciples didn’t live according to the strict Jewish rules of ritual washing, the verb they used for ‘live’ was peripateo. The Greek word for walking could actually mean, metaphorically, ‘conducting your life according to a particular set of ethical principles’. Rather than taking a religious route, Aristotle’s walking disciples chose to set out with him on the philosophical highway to happiness.

I have always loved walking, and now do much of my best thinking along the muddy bridleways of Cambridgeshire. At thirteen years old, and the daughter of an ordained Anglican priest, I lost my religion. The most difficult challenge to my fast-disappearing faith was the church’s insistence that being a good Christian required belief in supernatural occurrences and worshipping entities invisible and inaudible to my senses. I just couldn’t get in touch with the Invisible Friend I had previously called God any more. But coming to my secular senses left a big hole in my life. As a younger child, I was in no doubt that I would go to heaven if I was good. Now I felt like Antonius Block in Ingmar Bergman’s classic movie The Seventh Seal (1957), a religious sceptic during the fourteenth-century plague, desperate to find some meaning to life: ‘Nobody can live with death before his eyes if he thinks oblivion lies at the end.’ It may be no coincidence that Bergman was also the child of a Protestant priest. I no longer believed there was anyone or anything ‘out there’ in the cosmos who policed my life, or rewarded and punished me for virtuous and immoral acts respectively. I did not know what to put in His place. Yet I still longed to be a good person, live a constructive life, and ideally leave the planet a better place than I had arrived in it.

In my mid-teens I experimented briefly with astrology, Buddhism and transcendental meditation, and then, even more fleetingly, with more arcane phenomena including psychotropic drugs and spiritualism. I read Dale Carnegie’s classic How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1948) and other self-help manuals, but was left still searching for a workable, interesting and fundamentally optimistic moral system. When, as an undergraduate, I discovered Aristotle, he supplied the answer. He explains the material world through science, and the moral world by human standards rather than those imposed by an external deity.

Aristotle would have been the first to insist that no form of philosophical or scientific work can be purely theoretical. Our ideas, self-understanding and explanations of the world around us are integrally bound to our lived experience. He lived in eight diverse Greek places (see the map at the beginning of the book), and in April 2016 I visited them all to better understand his experiences. I followed in his life’s footsteps and tried to get some sense of the real world lying behind the man, the paths he actually paced as he developed his philosophical ideas in response to the challenges and opportunities which life threw at him.5

One of the greatest ancient commentators on Aristotle, Themistius, said that he was ‘more useful to the mass of people’ than other thinkers. It is still true. Philosopher Robert J. Anderson wrote in 1986, ‘There is no ancient thinker who can speak more directly to the concerns and anxieties of contemporary life than can Aristotle. Nor is it clear that any modern thinker offers as much for persons living in this time of uncertainty.’6 Aristotle’s practical approach to philosophy can change your life for the better.

Chapter 1

Happiness

AT THE BEGINNING of Eudemian Ethics, Aristotle quotes a line of wisdom literature inscribed on an ancient stone on the sacred island of Delos. It proclaimed that the three best things in life are ‘Justice, Health, and Achieving One’s Desires’. Aristotle trenchantly disagrees. According to him, the ultimate goal of human life is, simply, happiness, which means finding a purpose in order to realise your potential and working on your behaviour to become the best version of yourself. You are your own moral agent, but act in an interconnected world where partnerships with other people are of great significance.

Aristotle’s own teacher was Plato, himself the disciple of Socrates who famously said ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’. Aristotle regarded this is as somewhat harsh. He knew that many people – perhaps the majority – live intuitively and often unreflectively, but they enjoy great happiness, on ‘autopilot’ as it were. He would have shifted the emphasis to practical activity and to the future, and his alternative motto might have been: ‘the unplanned life is unlikely to be fully happy’.

Aristotelian ethics put the individual in charge. As Abraham Lincoln saw, ‘Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.’ Rather than working on autopilot, Aristotelian ethics put you as sole pilot at the full control panel. Other ethical systems place far less emphasis either on your individual moral agency or on your responsibilities towards others. Aristotelian ethics share the starting point of the moral agent with ethical egoism, associated with the early modern philosopher Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733), but nothing else. This system recommends that every individual consciously act so as to maximise their own self-interest. Imagine you are hosting a tea party for ten of your neighbours. You know that two are vegans. But vegan sandwiches are three times as expensive as ham sandwiches. If you buy two servings of vegan sandwiches, there will be less food all round for everybody. The egoist would ignore everyone else’s needs and choose whether to cater for the vegans depending on her own personal eating habits. If she were not a vegan, then she would certainly not want her helping of ham sandwiches diminished by having to cater for anyone else’s different preference. If she were a vegan, then she would ignore the deprivation suffered by all eight carnivores receiving smaller helpings and simply ensure that there was plenty of vegan food available for herself, and order a private extra serving.

Utilitarians, on the other hand, seek to maximise the happiness of the greatest number, thus focusing on consequences of actions: for utilitarians, a result involving eight happy carnivores completely trumps the accompanying problem of two miserable vegans. Utilitarianism gets difficult when the minorities are very large: a tea party with, say, four miserable vegans and only six happy carnivores would begin to feel decidedly unfestive. Followers of Immanuel Kant emphasise duties and obligations, asking whether there should be a universal and fixed law about the proportion of different kinds of sandwiches available at tea parties. Cultural relativists, on the other hand, have insisted that there is no such thing as a universal moral law. Everyone, they say, belongs to a group or groups which do have their own internalare