Aristotle

The first class on Aristotle's ethics didn't go well. He's a harder read than Plato and I wasn't at my best. So for Thursday I just started over. I went back to the first sentence of NE. It worked very well second time through. I could tell the students were starting to get a sense of who Aristotle was. Second time through gave me the opportunity to offer fresh examples.

Aristotle's point that happiness is an activity is hard for the modern mind to grasp. We are so strongly inclined to think that happiness is a state of mind that we have trouble hearing this. I eased into this by talking about happiness as a product. Suppose someone thought that winning the Superbowl was happiness. Would looking at that Superbowl ring next week, next month, next year, ... really be the same? Then I talked about how good it feels to do something really well. This could be playing music for those with that kind of talent, or skiing if you are good at that. Excellent activity feels good but Aristotle doesn't identify happiness with the feeling. He thinks that the feeling is merely a by-product of the activity. So what we want is an excellent activity that we can sustain for a very long time.

At this point I felt my students really got what Aristotle was saying.