Edith Hall on Aristotelian Ethics, Intention, and Human Decency

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1:32Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

2:19Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I remember quite vividly my introduction to Marcus Aurelius. I've told this story many times, but I happened to be taking a philosophy class at the time. I was not introduced to Marcus Aurelius in that philosophy class. No, it was called Philosophy and the Meaning of Life. I was at UCR. It was an honors seminar and was weirdly at the movie theater on right off campus, the University Village. I was trying to explain this to someone who goes there now. They didn't have enough classroom space. So some of the big freshmen and sophomore classes would be in the movie theater, which was actually close to my apartment, which was actually right across the street.

3:02And I was reading Aristotle. I read Nicomanchi and Ethics. That's what I was reading. And it was fascinating and eye-opening and I learned a lot from it. But then when I read Mark Sturilius, I was like, oh, this is it. I get this. But I still remain fascinated with Aristotle. There's a lot he can teach us. And that's what I am going to talk about with my guest today, Edith Hall, a professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University in Northeast England. She's a specialist in ancient Greek literature, but she's also an expert on Roman history, thought, and society. She's an expert on Aristotle, really, and how his school and his thinking has shaped the Western world.

3:46And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. I wanted to talk to her about Aristotle to do a briefing on Aristotle, effectively. And I think you're really going to like this episode. I quite enjoyed it. And she has a fascinating book I would like to recommend, Aristotle's Way, How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life. It was blurbed by one of my favorite writers, Sarah Bakewell, who I'm going to have on the podcast soon. She calls it a wonderfully lively and personal guide, read it and flourish. I think that's very well said. I think you're going to like this interview. Here's my chat with Professor Edith Hall talking about Aristotle and what he could teach us about modern life.

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7:35so talk to me about your introduction to aristotle where does it where does it begin with you i wrote this book called aristotle's way because i have been trying to put into practice aristotle's program for um trying to find what he calls happiness which is a very particular kind of happen is I've been trying to do that for about 40 years and have been very frustrated as a classical scholar with how little the general public seem to have access to Aristotle's ethics. I think they've been gate kept by the academy and I think that they are

8:30remarkably applicable to 21st century anxieties and remarkably practicable. And for me, they offer far more than any of the other ancient secular schools of ethics, of which there are at least five varieties. They're the ones that I've found most congenial. Yeah, maybe Aristotle didn't do himself any favors titling his most essential work Nicomanchian Ethics. It's like, even from the jump, you're like, what is this? How could I, as a regular person, read this, let alone have it apply to my life? Well, I know, and it's so sad because Nicomachus is simply the name of his father and his son. And in the traditional Greek way that still applies today, you name your oldest son after the paternal grandfather.

9:29And so when he writes his ethics, he's thinking in terms of handing on his wisdom to the next generation. if he called it friendly advice from a father to a son, I think we would all have been much quicker to dive in. I think so. Was that your introduction to Aristotle? Was that your way into his work? Well, I went to Oxford to study classics. I was very fortunate that in my day, because I wasn't from a wealthy background, In my day, there were still scholarships for bright kids to go to basically private schools where Greek was actually taught. I mean, these days I would not have got to Oxford to do classics.

10:20And I was looking for secular ethics. I mean, I was quite I knew I was. I was brought up in a very strict Christian household. My father is actually a Church of England, what you would call an Episcopalian minister. And at 13, I simply lost all my religion. I just lost it. And I found my teens and young adulthood extremely bewildering because I'd lost the rule book, How to Behave. So when I first started reading Aristotle at University, I actually got into him through reading Greek tragedy. because he wrote this famous little book called The Poetics about tragedy. And I was very struck by this.

11:06And I asked my tutor about the sort of moral focus of what Aristotle was saying about tragedy. And he said, well, just go read the Nicomachean Ethics if you're interested. And, you know, I really couldn't believe what I read. I felt as though I had come home. So that was my experience with the Stoics, almost to a T, a little bit later. So I'm excited to talk to you about it. It was a little bit later. The old institutions had fallen short or I had fallen away from them. And then I think for thousands of years, clearly human beings sort of break away from, you know, whatever maybe their parents taught them or they're not able to just operate on implicit assumptions about how a person should be.

11:56And they ask themselves, like, how should I live? What should I live by? And I think it's remarkable and beautiful how philosophy, you know, can give us an answer to the best of its ability to that sort of timeless question. I think what's remarkable, historically speaking, is that for nigh on a thousand years, these different secular systems were developed in antiquity. And it is not, of course, at all just peripatetic. That's Aristotelian philosophy. philosophy, absolutely Stoics. Probably there were more Stoics in the ancient Mediterranean world than there were any other one's school, but there were Platonists.

12:46Skeptics, cynics, yep. There were cynics, there were skeptics, exactly. So there was a whole smorgasbord of things to choose from, which thought about how should we live, how should we behave without God? And it really wasn't until the Enlightenment and it wasn't until the middle of the 18th century that you could even think about doing that without risk of being burnt at a stake. And so, you know, monotheistic religion really did put the kibosh on a lot of this. so I think it's really because certainly in the western world so much fewer people are really living by a kind of strict religious code especially since the 1960s it's where it's where that's where sociologists date the great secularization too yep and it's about far greater actually in Britain than it is in the states I think you'll find that statistically far more people say they are believers in God of one description or another in the USA.

13:53I think it's probably at least 50%, whereas in Britain, it is something like 8%. This is a godless society. And I think young people are desperately looking for principles to live by and a purpose to live four um my own children are generation z as you call it uh we call it generation z uh and they're constantly making up rules they are actually making rules for themselves about how they should be and how they should treat each other because they don't they feel so at sea um so this book was very much born out of the experience of parenthood actually um i've i've i've pushed out two, I've raised three, and I've found that Aristotelian thinking has, I think, helped me parent a lot better than I would have done without it.

14:50Yeah, I mean, when man stands alone in the universe, he has to figure out a reason to live and a methodology for living. You know, when the answer to those questions is, is not because God said so, or because you will go to hell, or you will go to heaven, right? Like, in some respects, it requires a lot more work to figure out a reason and a code, and why to be good and why not to be bad. And the good news is, basically the smartest people who ever lived worked on this problem for a really long time before something came along and sort of interrupted it or superseded it. And, you know, I'm just reading another book.

15:44It's funny, by another Edith, I was reading a biography of Robert F. Kennedy. And he's like in his 30s or 40s, when, you know, he'd obviously been raised in a very Catholic family. And someone gave him Edith Hamilton's book, The Greek Way. And it opens up this whole other side of him. You know, when Martin Luther King Jr. dies, he quotes Aeschylus, which he gets from this book in this famous speech. Well, that was Robert Kennedy, not John. Yeah, sorry. Sorry. I meant to say Robert. Yes, yes, yes. But I thought it was so interesting that, you know, it's also not necessarily in conflict with religion.

16:29It can supplement and complement and give someone a deeper understanding of, say, a moral compass or one's duty or, you know, how to process suffering and pain. Okay. So let's start with Aristotle then. And as we're thinking of Aristotle, walk me through his conception of happiness and the good life. Okay. Well, I actually always start with his question of what is it to be a human being? Sure. Let's start there. So before him, the biggest thinker was obviously Plato and Socrates. So they were his father and grandfather. He went to Plato's academy and was taught Socratic questions. But where Plato and Socrates start from the top down so that they construct a republic, designing it as a total system, Aristotle always starts with what it's like to be an individual anthropos, right?

17:36That's the human being. And he starts actually with animals. He says, actually, we're just another animal. Now, this was revolutionary. Ancient Greeks were quite clear. Featherless bipeds. Yes. Okay. That's platonic sort of joke. But he is absolutely clear that we are simply animals that have got certain attributes that are more developed than other animals. Sure. And this has extraordinarily revolutionary repercussions for the whole system. So it basically starts out with the idea that things like instincts for sex and food and love and pleasure are completely natural and completely good. And that your instincts will basically follow you, lead you to good nutrition, good relationships, healthy reproduction.

18:33Now, that is so different from the Platonic position, which is that bodies are deeply problematic. We should be denigrating the body at the expense of this disembodied soul that's going to have lasting life. And so I like to start with this animal. And that's also very good in terms of revising Aristotle for woman. OK, because in the whole platonic dualistic system, which was inherited by Christianity, where you've got soul and then you've got body, women tended to be denigrated to just these breeding machines who were not as intellectual and very much associated with physical desires and food and children and reproduction.

19:16Aristotle thinks that's wonderful. So I actually, although a lot of people think Aristotle's a sexist, I find him by far the most congenial of the ancient philosophical schools because he celebrates our animal-ness, right? So we have to start from that. But we have got capacities that other animals don't or don't have anything like so much develop. And the most important ones amongst these for him are the capacity to deliberate. that means to make planning decisions rational decisions about the direction of our lives other animals don't seem to be able to do that in company with that we have the capacity for disciplined recollection now that is different from memory he knew that dogs had memory he knew that you know if you take a dog around the same walk it'll get the sense of that walk but can a dog sit down with another dog and say, let's plan the future.

20:14And do you remember two years ago when we were in this valley and there weren't any rabbits? Whereas a human being can say, now let me try and recall what happened when I was last in this valley. So that sense of positionness in time, rational deliberation. And he also thinks that humour is rather delightful. Humour is one of the great gifts that he doesn't think other animals have. Now, I think some zoologists would disagree with that now, especially about some of the more advanced animals like apes and dolphins. But it is a very distinctive human skill, which allows us to deal with an awful lot of the suffering that we're more aware of, or at least we're more aware of the danger of it.

20:59We're far more aware of our precarity. We're probably the only animals completely aware of our impending mortality. So there's this bunch of gifts that you have got as an anthropos. He also doesn't believe, unlike almost every other ancient Greek until his time, that there is an afterlife. He just doesn't. He thinks that human beings will go on forever, which environmentalists would now question, but it's by constant reproduction of ourselves. So he really, I think, originated the idea that we're in this weird waiting room for death, all of us. And it is our responsibility as individuals to figure out ways to make that apparently desolate situation of the human condition bearable.

21:47So we have to make our own purpose, our own plans. And it's very exciting to me that he emphasizes the extent of our control over our destinies. He does acknowledge random bad luck as a terrible problem for humans and writes very, very interestingly about the interplay between free will and luck, bad luck, chance. But putting you right in the cockpit of your own aeroplane at the control system to make your flight for your 70 years or whatever, if you're lucky um as constructive as possible absolutely fit it fits with with my mindset that you know i've got to do it for myself it's up to me to make happiness if i make happiness that may also help the people around me be more happy uh and and that's what genuinely sort of got me up in the morning my life is a project and and he he also says that as animals i guess that we are political animals, which is somewhat unique.

23:03Sorry, can you hear me? Please, could you speak up a bit? Sorry. He also says that we're political animals. Yes. Now that's much misquoted. Much misquoted. It was famously misquoted in a dialogue between Donald Trump and the Pope at one point, because he says man, Anthropos, is a politikon zoan. Zoan is a member of an animal, not a plant, right? And he said we're a politikon zoan, but he didn't mean that that means we all want to get involved in horrible, controversial party politics and disputations. What he meant was that we like to live in a polis, And that is something that almost all other animals don't do.

23:54They don't elect to live in large communities with non-kin. We elect to live in very large communities with plenty of people we're not related to. And we've got to figure out the bonds that associate us as much with our neighbours, our fellow citizens on the other side of huge cities, and indeed with people in other cities. That's all he meant. And he goes through in his biological and zoological works all the ways that other animals live together and sees that, for example, bees and some birds might share a bit of that. But in general, animals stick with kin rather than making social relationships.

24:38That is what he meant. So he really meant man is a sociable animal rather than man is a political animal. Yes. Or perhaps that's just that we have an aversion to that. It says something about where our politics have become as opposed to there's a U.S. politician that famously said, government is the word we made up for the things we decide to do together. and I think Aristotle meant political or social in that sense, that we come together and do things, not that we belong to silly parties and fight each other over partisan issues. And that a certain level of civilization with a range of different goods and resources and activities available to us actually depends on cooperation.

25:27Nobody can provide, you know, he has a vision of a town where some people are tradesmen, some people are craftsmen. Some people are teachers, you know, and together we come together to make something much bigger than the sum of the parts. And that's very inspiring in a world today where there is so much divisiveness in politics and so much denial. You know, Margaret Thatcher famously said, there's no such thing as society. There are only individuals and their families. And that kind of anarcho-rightist rhetoric, that there really isn't such a thing as social glue between all of us, I find it intensely depressing.

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28:20no it is it is interesting to to think about what you said so so if you take um aristotle as uh not believing in the afterlife accepting that there's random bad luck and pain and suffering and that there's you know you could see a kind of futility in in human existence but there's also this this sort of hope and this uh profound purpose and meaning that comes from our tendency or ability to come together to do things. To me, I agree with your criticism of Thatcher there. That is inherently, that is almost a nihilistic view of the world that we're not actually part of this larger thing. We're all, it's the war of all against all kind of thing.

29:06And we have no dream of collective progress. Yes. I'm ultimately utopian. Yes. I think we don't have enough utopian thinking. I think we need to imagine what a better world for us all together could be like before we can begin to make it. And, you know, certainly that belief is what is responsible for the incredible progress that we've made, not just, you know, where the Greeks got, but also where we have gotten since the Greeks. Since the Renaissance, yeah. Yeah. Okay. So that's Aristotle's conception of the human being. What is the human being thriving or flourishing to him then, his conception of happiness?

29:54Well, that brings us to another key concept. I mean, there's about half a dozen really key concepts, and that is potential, human potential. Aristotle very strongly believes that we've all got what he calls our dunamis. It's actually the same word, sadly, that Nobel took for dynamite, which is terribly destructive, but your dunamis. Now, all humans, he did have a sort of prescient awareness that there must be something like DNA. So all humans have got the potentiality to grow up to be a mature homo sapiens. That is something that's implanted in you with your father's semen, according to Aristotle.

30:36There's a code. But on top of that, you've got an individual potential, which is quite unlike anybody else's. And he's fascinated by talent, by natural inborn, what would be the best word for it? Well, ability, natural inborn ability. He absolutely sees it requires lots of work and development, but that we've all got it. And you can't predict because of what someone's parents do or any other factor what it is and you can't be happy in his book unless you get your dunamis identified and then make a plan to fulfill it so he takes analogies of things like acorns so a little acorn has got a dunamis to become a a glorious adult, healthy oak tree.

31:32We've all got the potential to become a glorious, fully formed adult. And he thinks we hit our prime in our late 40s, actually, interestingly, when you've acquired a lot of practical wisdom and still got your health. But we've also got the individual one. He thinks that it's very, very easy to destroy people's chances of achieving that potential. I mean, most obviously, if you don't provide a human infant with love, food and an education, they will be psychotic, starving, malnourished and illiterate. There are some things you have to do. But each individual child also really needs people to put work into helping them find out what they are good at.

32:18But the joy here is it's really easy because it's what they like doing. Pleasure is the guide to dunamis, right? So with my children, what I did was just expose them, rather than being a helicopter mother who forced them to have hundreds of violin lessons or ballet lessons, I just exposed them to as many different things as I could to see where they got excited. And, you know, one of them showed them lots of movies. I happened to show a couple of Japanese manga. she is studying Japanese at university because she loved those movies so much yeah I mean I really mean it the other one um used to take them to lots of stately homes and castles and archaeological sites and museums not forcing them just you know they could go to the tea shop and the gift shop but she she she just went wild for history and read modern history at university but I'd had to see her hate music, hate cooking, hate a million and one other things before I saw the rapture actually at Warwick Castle.

33:26It's one of our best castle, this rapture listening to about the kings and queens and knights and warriors of the past. So it's really not that difficult. You know, it's a matter of keeping an open mind and not imposing your will. and he says that people who are miserable will never fulfill their potential and then they will end up being pretty miserable all their lives and they'll be on their deathbed saying, I wish I had tried to be an astronaut. I'm just going through that. It's better to have tried and failed. I'm just going through that with my two young children now. My oldest, we tried him in soccer and he never seemed to wrap his head around the game, tried him in baseball.

34:10Why should he? didn't seem to like it. And then last week we took him to Brazilian jujitsu wrestling, basically. And it was like a light went off. He was like, I want to come back tomorrow. He's like, I want to come back the day after. And it was like, you know, it's so easy as a parent to be like, my kid's not good at things. They don't, they're not athletic. You know, like you, you jump to these conclusions and, and really you just need to be, it should, you're just seeing it as the process of elimination. You're just crossing off things until you get to the one that the light turns on for them.

34:47And you know, it might be that the thing they're best at is just being a very nice person. You know? Yes. There's some people who just, some people would say they haven't done anything when they're nice, when in fact they've been a fantastic friend and parent. Sure. And they're the first person you'd want on the desert island because of their advanced emotional intelligence. And that's fine. That is absolutely fine. Everybody is good at something. I passionately believe that. I heard a story about a novelist who was, and I'm forgetting his name, so I feel sad about it, but he was writing something for like a fashion show or something.

35:32And he ends up taking his, his son to this fashion show and, you know, his son just sort of comes alive, uh, ends up meeting these people. He doesn't want to leave. And, and, and as they're in the car, uh, you know, his son sort of buzzing, talking about all this stuff. And his dad says something to him like, um, you found your people. That's great. And he said, you're early. Like you found people at 10 or 12 instead of 35. And it does seem, speaking of Aristotle, Aristotle finds his people. He falls into philosophy. He was meant to pose the questions that we're talking about. He doesn't. He is an object lesson.

36:17Aristotle is orphaned at the age of about 13. His parents die. and if that hadn't happened he would probably have ended up being a moderately satisfied general practitioner of medicine in his hometown that was his ancestral profession and he remains very interested in medicine but that's what he'd have done his father died he was sent off to his brother-in-law who lived somewhere else and was wealthy and lived with his much older sister and his brother-in-law, and they saw that this kid had the biggest intellect anybody had ever come across, and they sent him to Plato's Academy at 17. Wow. And the light must have gone on for him.

37:05Yes, but what I'm trying to say is he was actually lucky because he could easily have just been, I think, a slightly frustrated general practitioner for him, when what he wanted to do was actually figure out everything about the entire world. And he stayed 20 years at Plato's Academy, 17 to 37. That was all he wanted to do. Well, no, it's interesting. The dial turned one degree. A doctor is still a pretty cerebral intellectual pursuit, and he probably would have been very good at it and found lots of ways to satisfy his curiosity. But turning it just a few degrees towards what he was actually meant to do changes the course of human history.

37:51Yeah. And I think that really stayed with him, though, that he had been fortunate enough that his potential was spotted and acted on. Yes. Yes. And they had the finances to do it. Yes. Right. Sure. And the role of luck is obviously a part of that. Yeah. So Aristotle, what's the next big concept then from Aristotle? So we have this potential, we have to fulfill and then what is next? Okay. Closely related to your dunamis is what, if you fulfill your dunamis, if you get to be the best possible version of yourself, that's what we're talking about. And that sounds a bit new age, but it's the best possible you, then you achieve your telos.

38:38Teleology is another of Aristotle's great concepts that things are driving they want things even even inanimate objects have a sort of drive for completion a drive for fulfillment um so your telos is is whatever it is that you are aiming at right so it's important to have and he actually says it's a sketch you can't do a full color picture at 25 or 30 of what you want to be at 70 you can only do a sketch he actually says that like an outline because happenstance circumstances who you meet all these other things will get colored in but he says you need a sketch of a life plan and I actually I did that and and figured out with some help from a very important mentor in my life as well that you know I wanted to do something to leave the world a better place.

39:39I am that utopian. I was no good at actual politics. The only thing I'd got was a first-class degree from Oxford in Classics, and I did realise then very strong communication skills. I have always been able to communicate quite complicated ideas, quite simply. But I also knew I had to be a parent. I knew I had to be a parent. So I had a vision of, well, I'm 63 now. Actually, the age Aristotle died. But I had a vision of this rather contented woman in early old age who had got these children she'd raised around her and was using her brain to bring the ancient Greeks and Romans communicatively to as many.

40:24And you know what? I've just about done it. I've just about done it. It's all gravy from here. But I did formulate that picture at about 25. You formulate the picture, but you don't know what you don't know. So that's probably why he means it's a sketch, because there's all these things that you still have to learn. There's things you have to discover about the world. Things can happen in the world. There could be a war. Or Aristotle has no conception that the most powerful conqueror in the world will be named his student. The future lays before you and you can't possibly conceive everything that's going to happen.

41:10But you can have sort of your guiding principles or your sense of what your contribution is to be. And then you find a way to make it work inside that. And he thinks that what he calls happiness, and we should probably get on to his definition of it, one of the most moving things to me he ever said was that it's actually just doing what you're very good at actually in the act because you'll be getting pleasure from it. And actually, I think it's almost what you and I are doing right now. Just the one thing we're both good at is talking about moral philosophy. and because we're good at it we enjoy it and because we enjoy it we're good at it they they go together and it's actually in the moment that you're being eudaimone all right you are being eudaimone as you are doing it because his concept of happiness has got nothing to do with with transient sort of physical pleasure you know it's not the happy hour or of cocktails or having a happy meal or any of those kinds of things, or even a happy birthday.

42:17It's about continuously, daily re-enacting this best version of yourself, preferably, and he's big on friendship, in company with like-minded individuals. And if you do that repeatedly while trying to work on your character, your virtues and vices, then you have got the very best possible chance of being at ease on that deathbed. Does there have to be a social component or I guess a socially constructive component to it? I'm just thinking like if someone is a really good pickpocket or if you're Aristotle and you're really good at reducing cities and endlessly conquering, You know, one is doing what they are really good at, but is there a hollowness to it or an emptiness to it if it's not for the social good?

43:21Yes. And this is where the relationship of happiness to virtue comes in. We've talked about finding your potential, what you're really good at, in a sort of professional sense. but just as important, in fact, more important, is becoming the best possible version of yourself in terms of your moral character. And this puts people off. People don't like the word virtue. It sounds priggish and, you know, puts people off. I prefer to see, you know, let's talk language of American movies, you know, do the right thing. Human decency. It's about decency and trying to do the right thing in all circumstances, which takes a very considerable amount of thought.

44:11But what I didn't believe at first when I started reading Aristotle was that just trying to be a good person, trying to squash your vices and develop your virtues and treat your neighbour as yourself, really, that's what he actually does talk about that, that a friend, you treat a friend with the same love that you want, you should be offering yourself, that you will actually get inner happiness from that. Now, I've tried to persuade my husband of that. I have persuaded my husband he's more likely to be happy if he's nice to people. I have. But he thinks it's simply generated by the fact that it becomes reciprocal and they're nice back to you.

44:58he thinks it's sort of external so if you're kind to your children you're going to get a hell of a lot more out of those relationships with those children when they're older than if you're mean to them yeah same with your neighbor same with your employer same with everybody else that is absolutely true but I think Aristotle is right that you actually in make a battery inside yourself that is a happiness-making radiator that goes along with that. Because whatever the world tells you, however much criticism or persecution you may face, if you know you were trying to do your best, if you know you were trying to do your best, even in the worst possible circumstances, if you're wrongly imprisoned, the person who's in prison knowing they tried to do their best is going to be a hell of a lot happier than the one who knows they're in there justifiably, because it's just this warming battery.

46:01And I genuinely do believe that now. And I didn't believe that when I was first in touch with Aristotle, because I'd been given the Christian system of good behavior equals reward, right, instead of it being actually self-generated. Having said that, he thinks only very, very few people can do that in isolation. I mean, maybe the greatest philosopher in the world can become a hermit because he's just generating this happiness inside himself from his virtue. But he says, basically, we show our virtue in interactions with others. You've got to have an object of your virtue. So you need that family.

46:42You need those friends. You need that society.

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48:55Well, I think that the Stoics would say, right, like being kind, courteous, respectful, generous, etc. You control that, like you control whether you do it. you don't control whether it's reciprocated. So if you're doing it for the reciprocation, what Mark Stavros calls the third thing in meditations, he says, why did you ask for the third thing? You're probably setting yourself up for disappointment because you're not going to get it the vast majority of the time. There's huge overlap between Stoic virtue ethics and peripatetic ethics. And it's quite funny because they're called after two different buildings, you know, in Athens.

49:42One's the Peripatous and the other's the Stoa, you know. They're just named after these buildings. But to me, the thing I've not been able – there's lots of – I mean, I read Marcus Aurelius. I do. I read Epictetus. And I think in the actual thick of life, especially if the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, I think those mantras can be incredibly comforting and give you strength. And I see nothing wrong with a bit of a la carte ancient philosophy. Having said that, it's the dualism of Stoicism that, not as it's understood so much by Neostoics, but I have read all the ancient Stoics in Greek and Latin, every word, and they do think that desire and emotion need to be quelled and suppressed.

50:40Whereas Aristotle has this wonderful sliding scale where it's finding the right amount. And that is what makes me an Aristotelian, not a Stoic. I embrace my anger if it's in a justifiable cause. And Aristotle says that, you know, I even in base, you know, when I did my review of myself, because Aristotle gives you a sort of questionnaire in the Eudemian ethics to go through all your personal characteristics. And you've got to do glaringly honest self-diagnosis on your vices. If you don't do it honestly, you won't identify them. Then you won't be able to work on them. So you won't get the full happiness benefit.

51:19And I figured out that actually vindictiveness is probably my worst fault. I love revenge.

51:29But when I read Aristotle on this, I realized it's not a matter of either having it or not having a desire for revenge. It's a matter of having it in the appropriate amount at the appropriate time. If some guy, drunk guy, runs over my kid and they're in a wheelchair for life, right? It is perfectly right if you're a moral agent to seek at least some kind of recompense. So that desire for revenge is going to get you into court and going to get your kid proper funding for their wheelchair for life. And it's going to get that person punished for their irresponsibility. And a desire to see them called to account in those circumstances is absolutely fine.

52:16What isn't fine is dwelling on every tiny slight and snub that you've ever, and obsessing on it, which means you can't think beautiful thoughts. So that is what makes me an Aristotelian, is that for all my strong emotions, I am actually a very emotional person. And I try to find the right amount in the appropriate context rather than try to suppress them. And there is a lot, you have to be honest, Ryan, about beating down the flames of passion in Stoicism. And I actually quite like a moderately kindled fire of passion. No, I agree with that. There's a beautiful line in meditations that I've been thinking about recently where Marcus realized, I think he learned it from his philosophy teacher, Sextus.

53:01He says, the key is to be free of passion, but full of love. To me, that's a slightly different take on the sort of emotionless, passionless Stoic. But I agree. I think you make a good distinction there between the early writings of the Stoics and then how it seems that Marcus Aurelius and Seneca and Epictetus actually lived their lives, which seemed to be robust and interesting and full of relationships and engagement in life. And I wonder if one of the differences between, we were criticizing Aristotle for his poorly titled work, but one thing Aristotle really did was sit down and try to explain all these things.

53:46He was a philosopher in the sense that he was trying to wrap his arms around the universe and to communicate what he discovered. When I read meditations, I read it much more the perspective of this is a guy writing notes to himself about what he needed help with, as opposed to some comprehensive explanation of what is or isn't the good life. Exactly. And that's why I'm saying when, you know, the proverbial hits the fan, I absolutely, well, I turn to Dale Carnegie, who is simply stoicism for the modern American. Sure. Life gives you lemon, make a lemonade. I mean, what wisdom is that? That's such wisdom.

54:34Yeah, that's the stoics. But it's also fairly Aristotelian. It's like, is lemonade your one talent? And if making lemonade is your dunamis, then go and be a wonderful industrialist who employs billions of people and gives loads of philanthropic money back to the community and makes delicious beverages. I mean, what's wrong with that? No, that makes a lot of sense. And I feel like even Epictetus is incomplete in that, like, we don't have a sense that this is what Epictetus would have said, this is my handbook, right? This is Arian's summary of Epictetus. And, you know, maybe if looking back at it, he would have said, you know, hey, I'm missing this, this or this.

55:25Or, you know, by highlighting this too many times, it sounds like I'm saying that's the most important thing in the world. But actually, it's more nuanced than that. Yeah. So I wanted to go back to something you mentioned earlier, which is the idea of sort of, you're talking about doing the right thing. And Aristotle so perfectly says, as you said, do the right thing in the right time and the right amount and the right emotions, all of that. I'm in the middle now of doing this series on the cardinal virtues. So courage, self-discipline. But when it comes to justice, I agree with you. When people hear the word justice, they think the legal system or they think something very moralistic.

56:07When it does feel like both Aristotle and the Stoics believed it, as you said, which was like doing the right thing. Justice wasn't - Whiteness, yeah. Yes, exactly. Why do you feel like we have trouble? There isn't a corresponding concept, I guess, in the modern world. It seems strange. No, and it's something that troubles me a lot. We don't even talk about this. We don't talk about this with our teenagers about the problems of evil and problems of suffering and how to try and cope with that. I think intentionality is perhaps the final concept we should do. Aristotle says all actions are to be judged not on their actual outcome, but on the intention.

57:00Was the intention altruistic? Was the intention constructive? Right. So we all make terrible mistakes. I've made some of my worst mistakes have come from the very, very altruistic principles where I might have got a better outcome if I'd been more cynical or more pragmatic. But he says you can still, you can, you know, if you deliberated it well and thought that you were coming to the best possible decision for all concerned, then even if it goes wrong, you can take comfort from that. So intentionality, what is the intention? So people should not be punished for bad outcomes when they were trying to do good.

57:47But where does, say, like, erite come in there? So if one has great intentions, but is utterly incompetent in the execution, where does competence and skill come in? Well, that's where deliberation for Aristotle meant getting good advice as well as thinking hard for yourself. He sees it as a very collective thing. One of the great losses is he wrote a whole book on deliberation. Really? He wrote a whole book on how to make decisions collectively. We've got glimpses of that in book three of the Nike and McKeon Ethics. And there are some sort of rules like consider all precedents. calibrate all likelihoods, consult a disinterested, not an uninterested, a disinterested expert.

58:43You know, there's a set of things to do when you're making a decision. And I go around high schools teaching Aristotle's way of deciding, you know, whether to, you know, leave your boyfriend or not. And you know what? They just eat it up. They just write this down. They've never realized that the worst person to talk to is your best friend because they are thoroughly interested. Yes. Because they may want more of your time. Right? The worst person to consult is your best friend. You need to go to a relationship counselor who has no vested interest whatsoever. Sure. You need to think about how this person might react.

59:27You know, we see the sort of person who's going to hit you if necessary. You have to take precautions or, you know, there's a million and one things you do before you take an important decision. And I'm not deciding, saying what brand of baked beans you're going to buy. But, you know, any important life decision needs this eight point plan. The most important part of which is don't rush it on young people because of the speed of social media. you know in the old days if you were going to give in your um in my day if you're going to give in your notice at work it was made really angry one day yeah you went home you wrote a letter you put it by the front door to post in the morning and by the morning it was 50 50 chance that you would throw it away right you can't do it now you shoot off the email right so he would have been appalled And his number one rule is sleep on it.

1:00:21There was actually a Greek proverb. Really? Yeah. That's why they had the Delphic Oracle. Because if you're going to decide, shall we go to war? You have to get the approval from the Delphic Oracle. The point is not what the Oracle said. The point is that it took you three months on the waiting list to get an appointment. Yes. By which time, whether or not to go to war might look very different indeed. And they gave you an answer that was a riddle. and you really had to think about what actually needed to be done. You then spent another three months trying to figure the riddle. No, I love that.

1:00:59This was amazing. Thank you so much.

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