 We're going to be talking about Aristotle, a classic age philosopher, but who sets a lot of the agenda in a way for Hellenistic ethics. And we will very frequently be defining and describing positions of the Stoics, Epicureans, and skeptics in relation to Aristotle's view. One thing about Aristotle is he's known as the common sense philosopher. He sort of philosophizes and actually reasons out what everybody seems to think anyway. And so he presents a common sense picture that is easy to understand. But also when you start philosophically taking it apart, you realize that common sense has got a lot of problems and a lot of internal inconsistencies. And that motivates the revisionist and radical philosophies of the Hellenistic age. But I want to start off our discussion by doing a thought experiment. And so don't worry about the reading right now. Just think about this idea. So suppose that you won one of these mega lotteries that gives you $250 million or something like that. So this just happened to a college student from Florida now has a quarter of a billion dollars or something. And so imagine that happened to you. And my question for you, I want to get a couple of answers on board, is what you would then do with the rest of your life? If you suddenly found yourself fabulously wealthy like that, what kinds of things would you do with that money and do with the rest of your life? And this isn't a deep philosophical question. So if you would go to an island to drink datum and some Mai Thais or something like I would do, then that's perfectly fine. Just tell us what kinds of things you would like to do. Chemistry research and making sure that family is taken care of. OK, taking care of your family. What does that mean exactly? Make sure they don't have to worry about money anymore. OK. And chemistry research, what would that involve? I just love it. No, but how would you pursue it if you had all this money? I'd find someone to hire me. OK. Aren't you doing, you're a chemistry major, right? So you're already doing that. You don't need $250 million. I keep doing it because this is what I'm doing. OK, you keep on doing it because it's what you love. OK, very good. Others, yeah? Just build up a foundation like bonds. So I don't have to worry about money. So I do investment first. And then just do whatever I do right now to figure out what I want to do later and how you use this money. Well, that's the question, though. So I mean, I'm saying what would you do when you say I'd figure out what I'm going to do? Just try to do what people do in a movie or in a theater. Don't they fly to other planets and double get to work? That's what you would do? I guess. Well, explain. I don't understand. Ah, OK, so this is sort of like doing chemistry research. You would fund space exploration and try to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Let me figure out if this world is real or not. Well, again, I don't know if you need $250 million to do that. You could do that right here, right now, actually. Oh, then not even enough? Yeah. What do you think? So we really wouldn't change things for you. You'd keep doing exactly what you're not doing. Try to do research to find out if the world is real. OK, so you would fund research to find out if the world is real. I can probably cut that short for you, yeah, actually. That doesn't really tell us how it is, but something's real. OK, other people, yeah. Scientific research, like I want to do it too, but I feel like if I have that much money, I would fund my own research because there are a lot of research questions that are so out there that they're hard to get funding for. So people tend to do research on topics that are easy to get funding, but are not that. Right, so you would fund things that are more difficult and less popular and so that there could maybe be a greater breakthrough and more interesting results, that sort of thing. OK, very good. Now, I'm just not buying it that everybody in here would spend all of their money doing scientific research. Can we have some honest people answer this question? I would drop everything in this travel. All right, travel, like where? OK, and why would you do that? Because I'd like to learn about like experience, different things, experience, like different parts of the world. OK, and so that's sort of like research, in a way. Or is it more that you enjoy traveling and experiencing these things? It's pleasurable to do so. OK, very good. That's a nice, honest answer. Yeah, invest in a sports franchise. OK, why? That's something I'm passionate about. OK, and why is that? Just growing up, my whole life playing baseball and sports. So you enjoy it. So and you would like to take it further and actually manage the teams and put it together so you can defeat other people and things like that. OK, good answer. OK, way back. This would be the last one. Yeah, so I think I would just put myself to law school. But at the same time, I feel like stress would be my job. Then stop right there. Then you don't want to go to law school. I want to live a stress free life that should never be with, therefore, I would go to law school. The most stressed out people you've ever beat. Just right now, I'm working at a school, so I might need to maybe at least go on my own. OK, very good. Yes, you could relieve yourself of this burden of working which students didn't used to have when tuition and everything was free. And now that we've got this new regime, people have to work in order to go to school. And so that would be a way to reduce the stress of studying law. And why study law? Because I find it interesting, I enjoy it. Just to know about the law. Just to know about the law, yeah. Not to try to prevent injustices or get falsely accused people for even things like that? Yeah, also that. You'd also want to do that. Yeah, like I feel that now it's interesting to do that. OK, good. So the reason I went through that is to demonstrate a point about an assertion that Aristotle makes in chapter five of this. Chapters four and five, he's discussing commonly held views about what constitutes happiness. And in chapter five, he says, there are basically three prominent ways of life. The one that's devoted to enjoyment or pleasure, the one that's devoted to political activities or noble pursuits, and then third, the life of the mind or the contemplative life. And the answers that have been given fall into this. So the people that would spend the money, like me, spending on an island, having drinks or something, and the people who would travel because they enjoy it and they enjoy experiencing new things and new places and new people and that sort of thing, their concept of happiness is that it has to do with enjoyment or pleasure. Also to some extent, those who want a stress-free life and would spend the money relieving themselves of the horrible drudgery of having to work and so on. And then the people that would do things like helping their family and funding political campaigns to improve things or undertaking legal work on a pro-bono basis in order to help innocent people that have been wrongly charged and so forth, that's like people who are devoted to a political way of life and the virtues and nobility. And then the answer that so many of you are giving that you would fund scientific research and you would devote yourself to your own studies just because you're interested in it and so forth, that's like the contemplative life and the life of the mind. Now Aristotle also mentions a fourth one that here was partially mentioned, an idea of a life that would be devoted to money making. So there always seems to be a student that says, well, if I had $250 million, what I would do is keep trying to earn more money. I would keep investing that and keep trying to expand and get more and more money. Aristotle dismisses that as a way of life. He says, we don't undertake a life of money making voluntarily, we only do it if it's necessary to get these other things that we want in life, like pleasure and enjoyment or political motives and nobility or the life of the mind and contemplation. And that's because the life of money making isn't an end in and of itself. Having money itself is not enjoyable. Spending money because you have a lot of it on things that are enjoyable or are noble or stimulate your mind, that makes sense. But those three ways of life are the sort of overall kinds of ends that one might have. And of course, as the answers bring out, you might have some combination of those ends. So not everybody is a pure hedonist like me and would just do everything to pleasure. Some people would also help out their family and support political causes and continue to study or fund scientific research and things like that and some combination of them. But one thing this shows is that nothing has changed in 2,500 years. There are no new fundamentally different approaches to how to live life or what we think is important to life. We can easily take the motives that we have for life and recognize them in these ancient designations. So if you say you want to suffer, does that mean suffer? Does that mean suffer? Well, nobody said that. Nobody said that they would spend their money making themselves suffer. And it doesn't make any sense and I would worry about them and take them over to student health if they said that. But it just doesn't make any sense and nobody says that. And nobody ever says that. Yeah, so you mean a masochist? Somebody who's into state of masochistic dominatrix is not sort of saying that. Those people are devoted to pleasure. They enjoy doing that. It's a form of pleasure. Doesn't mean suffer to them any more. No, suffering is the wrong word. It's pain or something, but they enjoy that in some way. I mean, it does create some complications for a theory of pleasure as we will get into. But it's clear that if somebody was spending all their money buying whips and chains and leather and funding dominatrixes and SNM-oriented pornography and so forth, we would say they basically have a concept of the end of life as being about pleasure. I was curious where the artistic life would fall in with these. You mean what do you mean by the artistic life? I guess people who pursue art and creativity kind of for its own sake, it definitely isn't a pleasure or even an honor thing. Intellect might be closest, but even then, I'm not sure that art is just going to be incredible. So Aristotle would put that into this life of the mind contemplative way of life. Creative pursuits like creating poetry, creating drama, these sorts of things are intellectual pursuits. Even if they're oriented around music or visual painting or something, it is an activity of the mind and requires things like geometric knowledge and arithmetical knowledge and so forth to work in painting and music and so forth. And the stimulation we get from it, you're quite right. It isn't a crude kind of pleasure that we get from drinking and it isn't certainly a noble thing. Even if we're doing political art or something, it's more of a contemplative thing. Now, I like the suggestion. I mean, maybe we could say that Aristotle isn't giving due credit to that kind of life. And maybe there are really, we could discern another form of life that he doesn't pay much attention to. It's still an ancient ideal of life, but whether Aristotle gives its due or not is another question. Something else that just popped into my head is people who devote themselves to spirituality. I guess that would also be life of the mind, but like a monk or something. Yes, so that, in a way, ends up being Aristotle's ultimate concept of what happiness is, is a life totally devoted to contemplation. And so I'll say a bit more of that later when we get into the substance of his views. Yeah, I think there's something non-trivial about the question about suffering, because a lot of the things that are proposed are, bear with them, like a lot of late nights and lack of sleep and pain, studying law school or speech or burning yourself with dangerous chemicals because you don't observe lab safety or whatever. You still religious or, you know, give it the example of your veteran student who had to suffer a great deal of bodily harm in the name of something else. So there is something, I think, to be said for maybe as a piece of a slightly stoic position of, in order to seek certain pleasures, which are not physical pleasures, there is a degree of acceptance and even willingness to struggle. Certainly there is, but the point is that it's not an end. Nobody chooses a way of life oriented towards making them suffer. What happens is people choose things that make them suffer in pursuit of one of these other ways of life. So since they're devoted to a noble political cause, they're willing to suffer being attacked by police while they're protesting. Or if they're devoted to the life of the mind, then they will expose themselves to dangerous radiation trying to find out about atomic science or something like that. But nobody is choosing a way of life so that they'll suffer so that they would do these other things, spend money, pursue scientific research in order to find greater and greater ways that they could make themselves suffer or something. That isn't coherent. So there is no way of life oriented towards suffering, but there is willingness to undergo suffering for one of these other ways of life, including the life of pleasure. So if you go to the dentist and are willing to sit there and have your teeth pulled, you might do that as a heatness, because if you don't, you're going to have much greater pain and much less pleasure in the future when you have an abscess tooth or have a good canal or something like that. But we shouldn't think, god, those people who are going under the doctor's knife and going in for surgery or radiation treatment or going to the dentist, they're devoted to suffering, I guess. I guess their main motive in life is being tortured by people. That's not what's happening. What's happening is they're pursuing pleasure or bodily health or fitness or something like that and willing, instrumentally, to undergo suffering in order to bring that end back. OK, yeah. Does Aristotle make a difference between honor and virtue? Well, there is a difference, but he groups those two as far as a description of a way of life. People who are devoted to an ideal of honor are the same kind of people who work hard to cultivate virtues like courage and justice and support. Because the way he describes it, he seems like honor is more of an internal thing. Like, it's important to be honored, but virtue is more of an external thing. Like, you want to do virtue to other people. It's exactly the opposite. Honor is the external thing. You want to be honored, as you said, by other people, whereas virtue is a matter of your own internal condition. Like, your ability to control fear is what courage is about, whereas honor is being recognized for some accomplishment that you've had. But that is to agree that there's a difference. One is externally related. The other is internally related. But we don't need to get into the details of that. Is this a clarification question? No. OK, go ahead, though. You can comment on that. Kind of going off of that question, how dares they'll deal with someone who, as I said, has been able to end their life or commit suicide? Did they just say that they've decided the good is? Well, it depends on why they're doing it. If they're doing it for a politically noble cause, then we might say that they were devoted to nobility. If they were doing it to end suffering because they had iconic disease, we might say that the goal was pleasure. It depends. But the point is that human nature hasn't changed since antiquity. We haven't discovered new overall ways of life. And the basic things that we might orient ourselves to remain the same. Now, these things, these ways of life that one might devote themselves to, or devote themselves to some combination of them, Aristotle describes as being final ends. That is, things that we choose other things for the sake of, but we don't choose those things for the sake of something else. The equation comes to an end there. So that's the sense in which we call them final. And the things that we choose for their sake in order to bring them about are merely instrumental goods. So this is a crucial distinction between final goods and instrumental goods. To give you, go back to the example I gave about pleasure, I don't choose to have, suppose my end is pleasure, then I might choose going to the dentist and having a tooth pulled for the sake of avoiding pain in the future, or I might choose having a frozen drink for the sake of pleasure. And you might ask me, why are you going to the doctor and willing to sit there and undergo this pain, or why are you ordering that drink? And my answer has something to do with, well, I really enjoy frozen drinks, or I really want to avoid this pain happening to me in the future. But then when I give that explanation, I've given a kind of final end explanation that I'm doing it for enjoyment or pleasure or avoiding pain, as it were. It's not then apt to ask a further question, well, why would you want to do that? Why would you want to avoid pleasure? Why would you want to enjoy something? That I don't need a reason at that point, because I've got what is, as it were, an intrinsic end. It's not an instrument for something else. The other things are instrumental towards bringing it about. Again, if I'm pursuing political nobility, I might engage in long and painful campaigns and going door-to-door and developing political positions and that sort of thing. Oh, what's your name? You might pursue all of those things, electioneering and that sort of thing. And one might ask you why you're doing that. Eventually, you give a reason, well, I'm trying to promote, I'm trying to improve the political situation. OK, why are you doing that? Well, because I think it's good to help my fellow man and so forth, at that point you reach an intrinsic good, one that we don't need to keep asking, why in the world would anyone want to make the world a better place or why would somebody want to become more just? The question answers itself, because it's more just, because it makes the world a better place or something. Again, with studies, why are you studying this particular subject or why are you at university at all? Those are good questions you might ask, but if somebody says, well, I just enjoy the life of the mind or contemplation to me is the greatest activity I can engage in, then I don't keep asking, well, why would you want to engage in the activity that you think is the greatest or that's the most worthwhile? It's because those things are final ends. So if we can reasonably keep asking questions about why would you do that, why are you undertaking to do that thing, then we are dealing with instrumental goods. If we have reached a point where it doesn't make sense to keep asking that, but we understand why all these other things were chosen, then we've got what we call a final good. And in a way, we can use a generic term to designate this final good that everybody is pursuing. And the Greek term that's used for this is eudaimonia. And this gets translated a number of different ways into English, happiness, prosperity, success, flourishing, whatever. I prefer the term success because it's the most generic one. So if you ask me, why are you investing this money? Why are you studying to attain this degree and so forth? And we go down a long chain of reasoning and I say, well, because I want to be successful, then it doesn't make sense to say, well, why would you want to be successful? Why does somebody want to be successful? Or if you think of this in terms of happiness, well, I'm doing that. I'm helping my family. Or I'm traveling and experiencing these things because it makes me happy. I don't then say, but why in the world would anyone want to be happy? What's the point of wanting to be happy? So we can come up with a generic name for whatever it is that the ultimate ends that we're all pursuing are. We're all trying to become happy or we're trying to become successful. The problem, as Aristotle points it out, is that that's just a platitude to say everyone wants to be happy or everybody wants to be successful doesn't give us a lot of information. It just gives us a name of something we can use to designate a final and as opposed to an instrumental. And the question really is, what is eudaimonia? What actually constitutes success or happiness? And here is where we have big philosophical differences. Some people think that success or happiness is about having pleasure. Others think it is about being a virtuous person. Others think that it is about a life of the mind. Some people think that people can have reasonable differences about this. Others have absolute views about it must be one and only one of these and everybody else is pursuing some other end is confused about it. But whenever disagreements there are about what constitutes this final ultimate end of eudaimonia, everybody or almost everybody with one exception agrees that we all do pursue that and all have some kind of final end. We disagree about what it is, but nobody's with one exception seems to think that we don't try to organize our lives to bring about some overall end like success. Aristotle's psychology that will help us think about how these different kinds of goods relate. So the word psychology comes from the Greek word psyche. The Greek word psyche means the principle that makes something living as opposed to dead. So some bodies are not alive like stones and some are alive like plants and animals and human beings and the difference between those two is that the latter have a psyche and the former don't and psychology is the study of these principles that makes things alive. And so if we take a human psyche, Aristotle says we can actually recognize several different parts of it. There's an irrational part of our psyche and there is a rational part. The irrational part actually divides into several other parts. So part of our life functions have to do with things like nutrition, vegetation, reproduction, and so forth. And these are not responsive to reason, they're just things that, and we don't need to consciously direct them, they just are functions that are carried out by the living body. Another part of the irrational soul is the part that has sensations and desires and is actually responsible for what we pursue and avoid, so how we move around in space. And Aristotle says this part of the soul is responsive to reason. So we can have desire for a chocolate cake or for sex or something, but we can also restrain ourselves. And every time we see a chocolate cake, we don't immediately try to eat it. We might check ourselves and say, no, I'm on a diet. I won't do that. And so it's sometimes responds to reason, and then other times when there is problems, it doesn't. But those two parts of the soul are contrasted with the rational part of the soul. And we can talk about excellences or goods that apply to each of these parts of the soul. So the goods or virtues or excellences of the rational part of the soul are things like knowledge, science, insight, wisdom, and so forth. At the other end of the spectrum, the excellences or good conditions of our nutritive, vegetative soul are things like having health, beauty, fitness, things like that. The sensitive and desiderative part of the soul that is responsive to reason, this is the location, Aristotle thinks, that the excellences of this part of the soul result in the moral virtues like temperance, courage, justice, prudence, and so forth. And what these moral goods are are basically ways that we use reasoning in order to control our appetites and desires in a way that is good, in a way that brings about just outcomes or in a way that makes us courageous. So we have fear of the enemy while we're on the battlefield. But if we've trained ourselves and conditioned ourselves in order to not give into that fear and not drop our weapons and run away, then we are a courageous person. And if we restrain from eating chocolate cake every time we see it and we're able to maintain a diet, because we know that would be harmful for us, then we are temperate or self-controlled and so on. And we can give an analysis of, and Aristotle does give an elaborate, detailed analysis of each one of those kind of moral virtues. But he does make an overall major distinction between moral virtues, which have to do with reason, modulating, and controlling desires and appetites, and intellectual excellences, which are not really tied up with controlling emotions and so forth. They're more just operations of our intellect. Now, apart from those goods and those excellences that apply to various aspects of our lives and our existence, there are these things that we can call external goods, like having a lot of money, having power or status, living in a good place or a good country, things like that, where these things are goods, and we can recognize them in a way as being goods. But they aren't really goods in the sense of being perfections of part of us. They're goods in terms of things that we acquire and so on. Now, which of these goods is most important for bringing about success or happiness? Well, we can have a dispute about that. So if we think of pleasure as being a bodily good, then those people whose lives are devoted to pleasure will think it's really important to bring about those kinds of goods. Those who are devoted to nobility and honor and that sort of thing will want to cultivate these moral excellences or virtues. Those who are devoted to the way of life of the mind will want to cultivate intellectual virtues and excellences. What about external goods? Well, external goods seem to be merely instrumentally necessary in order to bring about these other kinds of goods. So I need a certain amount of resources in order to stay healthy or even to be able to train myself to be courageous or to fund scientific research in order to get more scientific knowledge and insight. And I may need power and status, and I may need to live in a good country and so forth also in order to make those things happen. Now, according to the common sense Aristotelian view, in a way, we need all of these goods in order to be happy and successful. And so even somebody who managed to cultivate all of these goods of the soul and to have a healthy condition of their body and to be a temperate and courageous person and even have knowledge and insight or even wisdom and that sort of thing, if they ran into a really bad situation with external goods, like their country was torn apart and put into a tyranny, their family was captured and tortured or murdered, all of their resources were taken away and they were put into prison and tortured on a rack, then Aristotle would not be willing to say that, well, still they're happy because they have these other things. He takes a common sense view that says the person being tortured on the rack cannot for the rest of their lives is not a happy or successful or prosperous person. And that's a really disappointing fact. He bites the bullet on that, but what that means is that according to Aristotle, whether we are happy, prosperous, successful, flourishing people is not totally up to us because our external goods are not totally up to us. Our circumstances beyond our control can throw our country into chaos or deprive us of power, status, and wealth and that sort of thing. Now, other philosophical schools downplay the importance of external goods or of other kinds of psychological goods. And so according to the Epicureans, if your body is in a healthy condition and you're fairly fit and you are able to enjoy pleasures or at least eliminate pain, then you really don't even need moral goods or intellectual goods to be happy. And you don't really need very many external goods in order to be happy. According to the Stoics, who perhaps have the most radical view, all that you need are intellectual goods. And that is because if you have intellectual goods and you really have wisdom and knowledge, then you necessarily have the moral goods. You are necessarily a just, courageous, and temperate person because justice, courage, and temperance are forms of knowledge according to them. Justice is knowing which debts to repay and knowing how to give people their due and so forth. Courage is knowing when to drop your weapons on the battlefield and run. Temperance is knowing when to eat the chocolate cake or not. And so if you have intellectual goods, you necessarily have moral goods and they say that what happens to your body is totally irrelevant. In fact, and what happens with external goods is totally irrelevant. If you have those intellectual goods and thus the relevant moral goods, you cannot become unhappy. And so they take a crazy, seeming position so we'll have to see how they can argue this that even if you're a sage, if you truly are a wise person, even being tortured on the rack, you can be a happy person because these things are happening to you but your success or prosperity is totally within your control. And if you are a moral hero that the enemy happens to have captured and happens to be doing bad things to you or you've been enslaved or whatever, you can still nevertheless be a successful person. And that we should look at that kind of person as being successful. And we shouldn't say that somebody who's actually kind of a scoundrel but has more external goods like wealth and status, they're actually more successful and more happy than this noble person who really has these moral and intellectual virtues but due to circumstances outside of their control suffers because of it. Yeah. Well, isn't it pretty agreed upon that like only diogenes and like one other person achieved sagehood and chapter seven says that we need to have like an achievable end. So if that's not realistic for most people. Well, we'll have to read the stoic views on it. I mean, if you're looking for a short answer, yes, very few people are sages. But what's the point? The people you've named, Socrates, Diogenes and so forth, they've done it. They've been happy and successful. So there is a model of happiness and success according to the stoics. And furthermore, they were happy and successful despite downturns in the situation of their external goods. So Diogenes was became enslaved. Nevertheless, he became, he was still a happy, successful person. Socrates was arrested, tried and put to death. Nevertheless, throughout it, he was a happy, successful person. We ought to think of those actual historical people as having been great, successful, flourishing people and not think that, well, come on, and this is how Aristotle would think of it. If you ended up a slave and you didn't really have control of your own resources and so forth, that doesn't really meet my concept of success. So we can have a substantive dispute about examples like that, but there is something to be said for the view that moral saints or sages and people, people like Gandhi, for example, that undergo a lot of trials and tribulations with respect to bodily goods, external goods and so forth. They are so intellectually and morally superior as people that we must count them as being success stories in the final analysis of what we consider a eudaimum human being. Okay, so that's the last point I want to emphasize. By the way, when we're talking about happiness, we're not talking about, as people often do, some temporary state of mind. Like you were happy this morning when you were having breakfast with your friends, then you came to this boring philosophy class and now you're sad and miserable, but leaving here and you go meet up with people for lunch and drinks, then you're happy again, but then when you sit down to look at all the reading you have to do, you're sad and depressed. That's not the kind of thing we're talking about. We're talking about a description of an entire life. Like how do we evaluate, what we're wondering about is what will we be able to say that at the end of your life, we'll be able to say, was this guy successful and happy in the philosophical sense? Was that overall life, was the life of dialogueings with the life of Gandhi, would we think of that kind of life as being successful? And we're not asking were they happy at 10 o'clock in the morning or were they sad at that point in time? We're talking about the entire life. And Aristotle actually takes this crazy position that says we can't even say you were happy just looking at your whole life because things could happen after you're dead. Like you could have devoted your life to big scientific projects and helping people that then are overturned and ruined and everything that you work for is totally destroyed. And we might say of that person that, well, that didn't end up very successful or that wasn't a very happy life because everything they were devoted to wasn't achieved. And that drives down to the point that Aristotle takes this common sense but annoying position that luck can affect whether you are happy or successful or not.