Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 045 - The Second Self - Aristotle On Pleasure And Friendship.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Second Self, Aristotle on Pleasure and Friendship. When you think of the good things in life, what springs to mind? Perhaps a nice meal, a glass of fine wine, pleasant conversation with friends. Or maybe you're less high-minded and will go straight for sex, fast cars, and cold hard cash. But as we saw last time, Aristotle identifies the good life as the life of reason and virtue. So would he purse his lips in stern disapproval at us, as we pursue those pleasant dinners, not to mention the sex, cars, and money? Or does he leave a place for such things in his consideration of happiness? While a modern reader of Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics is apt to come away with the impression that Aristotle is quite grumpy about this whole pleasure thing. Towards the beginning of the ethics, he mentions the life devoted to pleasure and dismisses it with a snort of derision. This is a life for cattle, not humans, he says. So it's surprising to discover that many ancient readers of the ethics thought of Aristotle as a defender of the comfortable life. He wasn't as objectionable as the crassly hedonist Epicureans, but for these critics, he still fell short of the full moral rigor one would expect from a proper philosopher. The critics were comparing Aristotle to Stoic and Platonist ethical thinkers, for whom only virtue is valuable and all else is intrinsically worthless. We've seen a view like this already in the mouth of Socrates, who argued that such things as wealth and power benefit their possessors only if they are joined to wisdom and virtue. We've seen Plato, too, arguing that a virtuous man is happy even if he is hated by society and subjected to injustices and torments. Aristotle, as so often, is happy to occupy the middle ground. On the one hand, he rejects hedonism. Though pleasure has its place in the good life, it is not the primary goal of the good life. But on the other hand, he adopts the common-sense judgment that someone who is, say, tortured to death after his family has been murdered by an unjust tyrant, is not happy, no matter how virtuous he is. Of course, he knew that he was disagreeing with his master Plato here, but as he says in the Ethics, we must honour truth above our friends. And as we saw last time, the truth about the good life is that it must be admirable and enviable for right-minded men. Unless we're Stoics or Platonists, we will probably agree with Aristotle that virtue is no guarantee of happiness, even if it is the best route to happiness. But this forces Aristotle to admit that our happiness is to some extent out of our own control. A tyrant can always come along and destroy our lives. In fact, Aristotle even finds it plausible that our happiness can retroactively be destroyed after our deaths, if our close friends and descendants have horrors visited upon them. This is a reminder that for Aristotle, being happy is more like being blessed than being content. There's another reason why Aristotle includes so-called external goods in the happy life, that is, goods like wealth, health, and family, in addition to virtue. He believes that virtues must be exercised to be worth anything. You'll have no opportunity to be generous if you have no money, or to be loyal if you have no friends, so the virtuous man needs a measure of material success just to make use of his virtue. On this point, Socrates might agree with Aristotle. Socrates, as portrayed by Plato at least, did allow that wealth and power would be valuable so long as it is in the hands of a wise and virtuous man, who would use them to do good. It's just that wealth and power have no value, and can even be harmful, in the absence of wisdom and virtue. Silvio Berlusconi, I'm looking at you. Still, there's no doubt that Socrates and Aristotle differ in their emphasis, with Aristotle happy to accept the importance of external goods, and Socrates constantly pointing out their intrinsic uselessness. Those Stoic and Platonist critics sided with Socrates, but, again, I suspect we're liable to find Aristotle's view attractive. Another attractive feature of Aristotle's ideas about happiness is something I already mentioned last time. For Aristotle, virtue itself is pleasurable to the virtuous man. This is because he is habituated to perform virtuous actions. He's used to them, to the point that they come naturally to him. However fearful it might be for him to stand bravely in battle, it would be even more painful for him to run away. He is courageous, and would find it excruciating, unbearable, to flee from a battle when he should not. He will also find it unpleasant to overeat at a banquet, whereas a moderate repast will be just what he likes best. Well, I say this view is attractive, but maybe you'll disagree. Maybe you'll say that if virtue is really to be admirable, it should be tough going. We should have to grit our teeth and do the right thing, not because we enjoy it, but because it is the right thing. It's traditional here to draw a contrast between Aristotle and a much later philosopher, Immanuel Kant. Whereas Aristotle thinks that enjoyment of virtue is a sure sign of virtuous character, Kant insists that morality really has nothing to do with enjoyment. It's not that Kant necessarily wants you to find moral duty unpleasant, that would be rather perverse, but certainly for Kant, if you help an old lady across the street just because you get a kick out of it, this doesn't count as a properly moral act. In a way, you're just lucky. You happen to be a person who enjoys helping old ladies rather than stealing their purses. The right reason for helping the old lady is that it is your duty, and any enjoyment you take in this is morally irrelevant, even if it is a nice bonus. Now, it must be said that Kant has a point. Aristotle's theory of virtue depends heavily on the idea of habituation. You become virtuous by being trained in virtue as you grow up. This means that if you don't get the right upbringing, you will not take enjoyment in the right things, and so you will not be virtuous. Thus Aristotle is vulnerable to what is sometimes called the problem of moral luck. That is, our ethical condition should not be a matter of happenstance, it should be up to us to control. Aristotle has a reply ready. He will say that there are indeed people who manage to do the right thing against their ingrained habit and inclination. These are people with encratea, which means something like self-control. Outwardly, the self-controlled man and the virtuous man seem very similar. They both will stand fast in battle, eat moderately at table, help the old lady across the street. The difference is that whereas the virtuous man enjoys doing these things and does it out of habit, the self-controlled man would rather run away in battle, eat like a pig, and ignore the old lady. Yet, he does the right thing because he knows that's what he's supposed to do. Now Aristotle will ask his usual question. Who would we admire more, and who would we rather be? I guess it's clear that we'd rather be the virtuous man, but the question of whom we admire more is trickier. When I think about this, I find myself changing my mind depending on the example. Someone who has to exert self-control to avoid snatching old lady's purses seems to me less admirable than someone who would never consider doing any such thing. But someone who fights bravely in battle even as every fibre of his being tells him to run, or someone who has to exert willpower to stay on their diet and eat moderately seems to me more admirable than people who do these same things naturally and with enjoyment. So it's not clear to me who has the better of this dispute between Aristotle and Kant. Of course Aristotle recognizes that not everyone does the right thing, so he identifies two other character types in addition to the virtuous and self-controlled men. Hardly opposed to the virtuous man is the vicious man, who does bad things the way the virtuous man does good things. He naturally, and out of habit, runs away from battles, snatches purses, and gobbles up cakes. He's not very interesting, really. His only use is to serve as a bad example. More fascinating is the bad twin of the self-controlled man, the weak-willed man. Aristotle calls this condition of weak will akrasia, often translated as incontinence. Someone with this defect of character knows what he should do, unlike the vicious man, but he is unable to do it because he is overcome by his desires and the prospect of pleasure or avoiding pain. Akrasia is precisely the phenomenon that Socrates claimed was impossible when he said that no one does wrong willingly. If you recall, his reasoning went like this. When we make choices, what we are doing is trying to choose what is good or what is best. So there is something self-defeating, even contradictory, about consciously choosing what is bad. It is tantamount to thinking, I reckon the best thing to do is this bad thing. Aristotle explicitly refers to Socrates and admits that he has levelled a powerful challenge against the possibility of akrasia. But again, defending a more commonsensical position, he says that akrasia obviously does exist, the question is how. Aristotle suggests that Socrates is right in a way, because the akratic man is indeed suffering from a failure of reasoning. He knows, for instance, that this cake is unhealthy and that he shouldn't eat unhealthy things. But the prospect of the delicious cake makes him temporarily unable to make use of this knowledge, so he pops it into his mouth. In this case, I am less persuaded by Aristotle. He must be right that akrasia genuinely exists, but I'm not sure he's right that akrasia resides in some kind of thoughtlessness and being swept away by pleasure. No doubt that does happen, but I would say people sometimes consciously in full awareness do things they know are bad. If that really does happen, it is clearly not what Aristotle is trying to explain in his theory of akrasia. We've seen then that Aristotle thinks the good life includes quite a lot of pleasure, and for a variety of reasons. For one thing, the total absence of pleasurable goods apart from virtue, like wealth and family, will destroy our happiness. For another, we'll need such things just in order to exercise our virtue. And finally, virtue itself will bring us pleasure as we exercise it. The good life is starting to look pretty pleasant after all. But now, I know what you're thinking. Why can't Aristotle just go ahead and be a hedonist? Why can't he say that the best life is simply the most pleasant life, perhaps by insisting that the virtuous man is the one who gets the most pleasure out of his activities? In that case, he was wrong to dismiss the life of pleasure as a life fit for cows. Far from it. It is actually a life fit for the best, most admirable man among us. And in short, is the happy life. And so we should organize our lives around the pursuit of pleasure. Aristotle does come back to the topic of pleasure later in the Ethics, and when he does so he makes it clear why he is not a hedonist. For him, devoting one's life to pleasure is not only a mistake, it is downright incoherent. To see why, we need to think a bit about the nature of pleasure itself. Pleasure always involves enjoying some activity, whether it is eating, driving a fast car, or simply feeling at peace with yourself. So pleasure is a kind of secondary phenomenon, which comes along on top of some primary activity or experience. This seemingly innocuous fact spells doom for the hedonist. It means that, when we ask whether a certain pleasure is worth pursuing, the answer will always depend on the activity to which the pleasure is attached. If you take pleasure in doing mathematics, and also in eating cake, then the question of which pleasure is more worthwhile will depend on whether mathematics or cake is intrinsically better. This allows Aristotle to insist that even if pleasure in itself is always good, it is to be avoided when it accompanies an activity which is bad. Again, notice how he has staked out a compromise position. He's not denying that pleasure is good, and neither is he saying that it is THE good. Rather, it is in itself a good thing, and sometimes accompanies other good things, but sometimes it arises from bad things, and this makes all the difference. The hedonist might try responding that we should try to maximize pleasure, that is, choose between pleasures not on the basis of their associated activities, but on the basis of what is most pleasant. To this, Aristotle might say that there is no reason to suppose that we are able to compare, say, the pleasure of mathematics and the pleasure of cake. Nonetheless, you might well have to choose, for instance if you were invited both to a birthday party and a mathematics seminar. And then, Aristotle will insist that the choice should not depend on the quantity of pleasure each activity would provide, but on which activity is more worthwhile. Which activity will do more to contribute to my overall well-being and flourishing. As appealing as all this sounds, there is still a problem lurking. I mentioned it at the end of the last episode. Aristotle's ethics seems to be all about my own personal flourishing and excellence. I am trying to achieve happiness, and the way to do it is to engage in the activities distinctive to me as a human, the use of reason, in both the practical and theoretical spheres. It's an ethical theory that is demanding, that calls us to achievement and great deeds, be they political, military, or, best of all, philosophical. But isn't it also, well, a little selfish? What if my friends and family get in the way of my excellence? Of course, Aristotle has said that no one can be happy without friends and family, and perhaps I need them around to exercise some of my virtues like generosity and loyalty, but surely these are the wrong reasons to value my loved ones. I shouldn't be keeping them around for my own benefit. If anything, I should be seeking to promote their good above my own. Aristotle's answer comes in Books VIII and IX of the Ethics, which are devoted to friendship. The Greek term, which I already mentioned when discussing Plato's erotic dialogues, is philia. It's worth emphasizing that two out of the ten books of the Ethics are about this topic. Clearly, this is something Aristotle took seriously, though I don't think it is necessarily because he felt that ethics needs to be other-regarding rather than self-regarding. His ethical theory is fundamentally eudaimonist, meaning that it seeks to ground ethics in the eudaimonia, or happiness, of the ethical agent rather than in some kind of responsibilities or duties the agent owes to other people. But Aristotle definitely thought the virtuous person would have friends. In fact, he thought something much stronger than this, he thought that in the strict and proper sense, only the virtuous person can have friends. According to Aristotle, there are three kinds of relationship that we count as friendships. Some friends spend time together simply because it is useful to both parties. These utility friendships may be long-lasting and deeply valued. Think for instance of two business partners who might work together for their whole career and help to make one another rich and successful. But such relationships are also vulnerable to circumstance. If you and I are friends in this way, I may just drop you like a hot potato as soon as your usefulness ends. Similar are friendships of pleasure, which are predicated on some shared activity the friends enjoy. The drinking buddy is the ultimate example of this. Again, the friendship is based on something incidental to the actual friend, and this makes the friendship vulnerable. Suppose I give up drinking. I'll give up my drinking buddies too. Although these two kinds of friendship are in a sense defective, we can nonetheless call them friendship because of their resemblance to true friendship. This sort of friendship is grounded not in something incidental to the friend, like their usefulness or shared pleasures, but rather in the character of the friend. If I am really and truly friends with you, it must be because I admire and value your character and you admire and value my character. This is why, in a sense, only virtuous people can really be friends, because they are the only ones who really have admirable and valuable characters. In the ideal case, the two friends will be equal in virtue. Inequality, for Aristotle, is inimical to friendship, and he comments rather unpleasantly that this is why men can't be friends with women, even with their wives, because women are intrinsically inferior. It also explains, as he says in a striking passage, why we cannot be friends with God. So Aristotle can explain why virtuous people are not selfish egotists. They may not cherish the worth of all other humans. Indeed, it sounds like they will have little but scorn for most people, an impression we'll see confirmed when we get to Aristotle's thoughts about slavery in a future episode. But other people who are more or less virtuous will be valued by the virtuous person, and for their own sakes. In the ideal case of virtue-friendship, Aristotle even says that the virtuous man considers the friend a second self and will consider his deeds to be effectively his own. This again is a noble idea, though one might worry that it collapses back into egotism after all. If in an ideal virtue-friendship my friend is for all intents and purposes another me, doesn't that show that virtue is really selfish? It is all about me, me, me, and there are as many mes as I have virtuous friends. The problem becomes even more pressing when we get to the notorious end of the ethics, in which Aristotle suddenly announces that the best life is not after all a matter of political activity, but rather a life devoted to philosophical contemplation. Where does this leave interpersonal relationships, or for that matter virtuous practical activity? This is just one topic I'll be looking at next time with someone who is far better than a second me, in fact a leading expert on Aristotelian ethics. So be a pal, and join me for an interview with Dominic Scott next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.