Title: Aristotle's Way Pdf How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life
Aristotle was the first philosopher to inquire into subjective happiness, and he understood its essence better and more clearly than anyone since. According to Aristotle, happiness is not about well-being, but instead a lasting state of contentment, which should be the ultimate goal of human life. We become happy through finding a purpose, realizing our potential, and modifying our behavior to become the best version of ourselves. With these objectives in mind, Aristotle developed a humane program for becoming a happy person, which has stood the test of time, comprising much of what today we associate with the good life: meaning, creativity, and positivity. Most importantly, Aristotle understood happiness as available to the vast majority us, but only, crucially, if we decide to apply ourselves to its creation--and he led by example. As Hall writes, "If you believe that the goal of human life is to maximize happiness, then you are a budding Aristotelian."
In expert yet vibrant modern language, Hall lays out the crux of Aristotle's thinking, mixing affecting autobiographical anecdotes with a deep wealth of classical learning. For Hall, whose own life has been greatly improved by her understanding of Aristotle, this is an intensely personal subject. She distills his ancient wisdom into ten practical and universal lessons to help us confront life's difficult and crucial moments, summarizing a lifetime of the most rarefied and brilliant scholarship.
Colorful Exposition of Aristotle's Thought As I write, the British Prime Minister Theresa May is still engaged in working out the ways in which the United Kingdom will exit from the European Union.As I write, President Donald J. Trump has just recently delivered his delayed State of the Union address in the United States.The United Kingdom and the United States are part of the world-wide English-speaking world in which the British classicist Edith Hall has now launched her ambitious new book Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life (New York: Penguin Press, 2019). The British edition of her book came out in 2018.In terms of the categories of civic rhetoric that Aristotle himself refers to in his treatise on civic rhetoric, her book is in the category of epideictic rhetoric, because it is centered on values and value-orientations – and because it is future-oriented.In a similar way, I would say that Aristotle’s treatises known as the Nicomachean Ethics and the Eudemian Ethics are centered on values and value-orientations -- and also tend to be future-oriented – and can therefore also be categorized as examples of Aristotle’s own practice of epideictic rhetoric, albeit in a kind of private way, or at least not publicly in the agora, and in writing, not in live oral discourse in public (although he may also have taught many of these points to his students in live interactions with them).Now, in the United States, all campaign rhetoric involves what Aristotle refers to as epideictic rhetoric.However, if Aristotle’s own way of life and the wisdom about living that he set forth in his mature writings that have survived “Can Change Your Life,” who are “You” – in other words, who is Edith Hall writing her book for?Edith Hall tells us that she herself is the “daughter of an ordained Anglican priest” who “[a]t thirteen years old” lost her religion (page 20). She “discovered Aristotle” when she was an undergraduate (page 21). She appears to be writing primarily for her fellow secularists, perhaps including undergraduates.Elsewhere, Edith Hall writes “in any attempt to revive Aristotelian philosophy, especially for a woman” (page 17). This and certain other hints in her book suggest that she is writing primarily for women.As to “Chang[ing] Your Life,” Edith Hall does not assume that merely reading her book carefully will be sufficient enough to enable you to “Change your Life.” However, she does appear to assume that merely reading her book carefully might persuade you that you “Can Change Your Life.” If it does so persuade you, she supplies you with “Further Reading” (pages 237-242) related to her introduction (pages 1-21) and each of her ten chapters (pages 23-231) – books and articles by scholars (listed alphabetically in each subsection) who have studied Aristotle’s thought carefully and written about the themes Edith Hall discusses in her introduction and the ten following chapters.But her suggestions for “Further Reading” strike me as works that would be available only to people who have access to college and university libraries. However, if any of the books and articles Edith Hall lists are available free on the Internet, she does not provide information about how to access them for free. But to buy all of the books she lists from used-book dealers on the Internet would be prohibitively expensive. As a retired faculty member at a regional campus of a major research university in the United States, I do have access to excellent inter-library-loan services. However, I do not know how many other Americans have access to such services.So Edith Hall seems to be writing her book primarily, but not necessarily solely, for secularist women who have access to college and university libraries.Disclosure: I am not a secularist, but a theistic humanist. I encountered Aristotle’s thought as an undergraduate when I studied Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy, first, at a Jesuit college and, subsequently, at a Jesuit university, both in the United States. Most of my professional publications have involved, implicitly, Aristotle’s thought about actuating human potential.Now, Edith Hall’s ten chapters cover the following themes in Aristotle’s texts:(1) Happiness (pages 23-38);(2) Potential (pages 39-57);(3) Decisions (pages 59-75);(4) Communication (pages 77-97);(5) Self-Knowledge (pages 99-125);(6) Intentions (pages 127-143);(7) Love (pages 145-160);(8) Community (pages 161-181);(9) Leisure (pages 183-200);(10) Mortality (pages 201-231).In her suggestions for “Further Reading” (pages 237-242), Edith Hall frequently lists books and articles by certain scholars who hold (or held, if they are now deceased) doctorates in philosophy. For example, in her suggestions related to her introduction, she lists (page 237) the American philosopher Mortimer J. Adler’s admirably lucid and accessible book Aristotle for Everybody: Difficult Thought Made Easy (Macmillan, 1978). But she does not also list his admirably lucid and accessible book Desires Right & Wrong: The Ethics of Enough (Macmillan, 1991), in which he discusses most of the themes she discusses in her ten chapters.However, Edith Hall herself does not hold a doctorate in philosophy. She revised and published her 1988 Cambridge University doctoral dissertation in classics as the book Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1989).My favorite scholar is the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and polymath Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955), whose English ancestors on his father’s side of the family left East Anglia on the same ship that brought Roger Williams to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631 – five years before the founding of Harvard College. In any event, in the title essay of Ong’s book The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies (New York: Macmillan, 1962, pages 260-285), he works with the barbarian/Greek contrast that Edith Hall later studied in her thoroughly researched doctoral dissertation.Ong’s title essay “The Barbarian Within: Outsiders Inside Society Today” is reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry (Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2002, pages 277-300).Ong’s massively researched doctoral dissertation centered on the French logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572). Because Ramus was a logician, Ong situated him and his work in the context of the history of formal logic (also known as dialectic) in Western culture, going back to Aristotle’s treatises about formal logic (known collectively as the Organon).Ong’s doctoral dissertation was published, slightly revised in two volumes by Harvard University Press in 1958: (1) Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason, and (2) Ramus and Talon Inventory.In Ong’s all-important 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason, Ong explains the quantification of thought in medieval logic in the Aristotelian tradition of logic (pages 53-91).Then in Ong’s 1962 book The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies, mentioned above, he explains in detail the significance of the quantification of thought in the medieval tradition of Aristotelian logic (page 72):“In this historical perspective, medieval scholastic logic appears as a kind of pre-mathematics, a subtle and unwitting preparation for the large-scale operations in quantitative modes of thinking which will characterize the modern world. In assessing the meaning of [medieval] scholasticism, one must keep in mind an important and astounding fact: in the whole history of the human mind, mathematics and mathematical physics come into their own, in a way which has changed the face of the earth and promises or threatens to change it even more, at only one place and time, that is, in Western Europe immediately after the [medieval] scholastic experience [in short, in print culture]. Elsewhere, no matter how advanced the culture on other scores, and even along mathematical lines, as in the case of the Babylonian, nothing like a real mathematical transformation of thinking takes place – not among the ancient Egyptians or Assyrians or Greeks or Romans, not among the peoples of India nor the Chinese nor the Japanese, not among the Aztecs or Mayas, not in Islam despite the promising beginnings there, any more than among the Tartars or the Avars or the Turks. These people can all now share the common scientific knowledge, but the scientific tradition itself which they share is not a merging of various parallel discoveries made by their various civilizations. IT REPRESENTS A NEW STATE OF MIND. However great contributions other civilizations may hereafter make to the tradition, our scientific world traces its origins back always to seventeenth and sixteenth century Europe [in short, to Copernicus and Galileo], to the place where for some three centuries and more the [medieval] arts course taught in universities and para-university schools had pounded into the heads of youth a study program consisting almost exclusively of a highly quantified logic and a companion physics, both taught on a scale and with an enthusiasm never approximated or even dreamt of in ancient academies” (I have added the capitalization emphasis here).In any event, the study of Ramus’ logic dominated the curriculum not only of Harvard College in the seventeenth century, but also of Cambridge University in East Anglia when John Milton studied it there. Later in his life, he worked up a textbook in logic (in Latin) based on one of Ramus’ books (in Latin). Subsequently, after Milton himself had become famous, he published his textbook in logic in 1672 (in Latin).Ong and Charles J. Ermatinger edited and translated Milton’s Logic for volume eight of Yale’s Complete Prose Works of John Milton: 1666-1682 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982, pages 139-407) – and Ong supplied a lengthy introduction about the history of formal logic (pages 144-207).Ong’s lengthy introduction is reprinted, slightly abridged, as “Introduction to Milton’s Logic” in volume four of Ong’s Faith and Contexts (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999, pages 111-142).Now, in her new book Aristotle’s Way, Edith Hall perceptively describes Aristotle’s account of formal logic (pages 81-85). Unfortunately, Edith Hall does not list Ong’s important 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason or Ong’s lengthy 1982 introduction to Milton’s Logic in the relevant section of her suggestions for “Further Reading” (page 239).Now, all of Edith Hall’s quotations from Aristotle in her book Aristotle’s Way are her own translations. Moreover, she claims that “the lack of idiomatic translations of the Greek has been one reason why Aristotle’s sensible and effective program of pursuing happiness through deciding to Do the Right Thing has not become more widely understood among the general public” (page 30) – who do not have the time and leisure to read the books and articles she recommends in her “Further Reading” (page 237-242).Now. Joe Sachs, who taught for thirty years in the Great Books program at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, has supplied the English-speaking world with the following translations of certain ancient Greek texts:Homer: Iliad (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2018).Homer: Odyssey (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2014).Socrates and the Sophists: Plato’s Protagoras, Euthydemus, Hippias Major and Cratylus (Indianapolis: Focus/ Hackett Publishing, 2011).Plato: Republic (Indianapolis: Focus/ Hackett Publishing, 2007).Plato: Gorgias and Aristotle: Rhetoric (Indianapolis: Focus/ Hackett Publishing, 2009).Aristotle: Poetics (Indianapolis: Focus? Hackett Publishing, 2006).Aristotle: Politics (Indianapolis: Focus/ Hackett Publishing, 2012).Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics (Indianapolis: Focus/ Hackett Publishing, 2002).Aristotle’s On the Soul and On Memory and Recollection (Santa Fe: Green Lion Press, 2004).Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Santa Fe: Green Lion Press, 2002).Aristotle’s Physics: A Guided Study (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995).However, as far as I know, Joe Sach’s translations have not yet made Aristotelian philosophy more widely understood among the general public. However, if the lack of idiomatic translations of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Eudemian Ethics is the problem that Halls says it is, it strikes me that she should get busy and translates those two texts into idiomatic English.Now, as to Edith Hall’s “attempt to revive Aristotelian philosophy,” your guess is as good as mine as to how much headway she might make toward this goal. But my guess is that she is not going to make much headway. However, I will be happy if my guess turns out to be wrong.How best to spend one's time The subtitle "How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life" is indeed very apt. I found the last three chapters particularly interesting, on Community, Leisure, and Mortality, and these chapters make one think and reflect about one's own life.Defines the Optimal Path in Life One of the many tragedies of American Public Education (Indoctrination) is that it ignores the fact that Aristotle defined the path to human happiness and today there is no place for him in our schools. Read this and find your own best path to happiness. I did.
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