An Aristotelian Life (Part 2)

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This post continues my run through Marcia Homiak's article "An Aristotelian Life", which appears in the collection Philosophers without Gods.

In part one, I outlined the major landmarks in the Aristotelian vision of the well-lived life. They were:

• You should develop and utilise your rational and cognitive powers.
• You should bring these powers to bear across a broad range of activities (work and hobbies).
• To fully realise your rational powers, you should engage in cooperative and communal activity, this activity will give rise to friendship: a deep and lasting concerning for the welfare of others.
• You should participate in a governmental system that helps to cultivate and sustain human rationality.

Having sketched the broad contours of the Aristotelian ideal, Homiak proceeds to detail how she puts the ideal into practice in her own life. I will skip over this section since it is relatively uninteresting to learn how an academic uses rational and cognitive powers in their work.

Her one interesting observation may come when she suggests that life in a representative democracy and consumer capitalistic society may not correspond to the Aristotelian ideal. She is not overbearing when making this claim -- she thinks there are still opportunities to exercise one's cognitive powers -- but she is alert to the possibility of becoming too passive. That is, of simply consuming and being a legal and political subject without creating and participating.

At the end of her essay she compares the Aristotelian life with the religious life. I want to focus the remainder of the post on this comparison.


1. The Benefits of the Religious Life
Homiak begins with some observations about her religious friends and family. She notes that they are kind, decent, hard-working, charitable and intelligent people. Their professed love of God and commitment to religious ideals seems to provide them with meaning and direction.

Specifically, religious belief seems to provide her friends and family with five benefits.

• First, it provides guidance for how to live one's life, how to identify what is important, valuable and worthwhile.

• Second, it provides the motivation for acts of human decency, generosity and beneficence.

• Third, it can provide them with the psychological strength to do what is right even when the odds are stacked against them or they are in great peril.

• Fourth, it ties them together and creates deep social bonds of love, friendship and affection.

• And fifth, it can provide comfort in times of hardship and distress.

Homiak argues that the Aristotelian vision can provide the exact same benefits albeit dressed in secular clothing. Let's see how she supports this claim.


2. The Benefits of the Aristotelian Life
It is easy to see that the Aristotelian life provides the first benefit. Indeed, Aristotle developed his account in order to answer the question "What is the good life?". The vision -- the relentless development and utilisation of our rational and cognitive powers -- allows us to see what is important and worthwhile, and pursue policies that help ourselves and others to pursue these ends.

In pursuing the Aristotelian ideal, we must also act with decency and generosity toward our fellow human beings. This is because the flourishing of our rational and cognitive powers is stunted if we do not cooperate with others for mutually beneficial ends.

Can the Aristotelian vision provide the psychological strength to do what is right in difficult circumstances? Homiak thinks it can. She argues that the Aristotelian political system is one that provides the education essential to developing our rational and cognitive powers. If this system is threatened, the citizenry will do anything they can to preserve it.

Finally, because the Aristotelian life reaches its zenith when it communes with others in rational and cognitive congregations, it creates and sustains social networks bound together by love and friendship. It is these networks that can provide comfort and sustenance in times of hardship.

In these ways, the Aristotelian life is at least the equal of the religious life.

An Aristotelian Life (Part 1)

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"An Aristotelian Life" is an essay by Marcia Homiak that appears in the collection Philosophers Without Gods. This is a pretty good collection of essays with some solid philosophical pieces being mixed-in with more anecdotal and autobiographical pieces.

Homiak's essay lies more on the philosophical side of the ledger, although it is an easy read (not that reading philosophy should always be like wading through verbal quicksand).

Homiak, like many of the contributors to the collection, adopts a conciliatory tone towards religion. She begins by praising her religious friends and noting how their beliefs have helped them to live good, decent, hard-working and charitable lives.

This acknowledgement inspires the remainder of her essay. She asks the question: is there any secular philosophy that can have a similar effect on our lives? She answers in the affirmative by outlining an Aristotelian vision of life.

The essay has three main sections. The first section gives us the basic sketch of an Aristotelian life. The second section shows how these Aristotelian principles can be used in everyday life. The author draws on her own experiences in this section. The final section compares the Aristotelian life with the religious life.

In this post, we will focus on the first of those sections.


1. Seek Happiness or Eudaimonia
The Aristotelian vision of life is set out in the Nicomachean Ethics. It begins with the simple observation that the good life is the life of happiness or flourishing.

For some, this goal of happiness is compatible with being an emaciated, malnourished but deliriously happy heroin addict. This is obviously not Aristotle's vision. For him, happiness consists in the exercise of our distinctively human capacities for rational thought and cognition.

What are these capacities? They are those with which we explore the deep nature of reality, seek reasons for action, and appreciate beauty, symmetry and elegance. Or to put it another way, they are the capacities with which we go beyond the superficial but essential business of survival and approach the ideals of the good, the true and the beautiful.


2. Individual Activity
The first sphere in which these capacities need to be exercised is the sphere of individual activity. This encompasses our jobs and our hobbies.

For the Aristotelian, these quotidian practices should be besieged by all the powers of the rational intellect. If you wish to be chef, you should explore the nuances of textures and flavours. If you wish to be a football player, you should try to understand the rhythms and strategies of the game. If you wish to be an accountant, you should try to plumb the intellectual depths of bookkeeping.

It also important not to become too absorbed by one activity; not to put all of your cognitive eggs in the one basket. Such a life would be shallow and unstable. For example, the life of the footballer can only be sustained in youth and good health.

Instead, you should seek to exercise your mind across a range of disciplines and activities.


3. Collective Activity
Of course, no man (or woman) is an island. They cannot pursue activities in total isolation. There are two reasons for this. First, we need the help of others to prevent life becoming a grueling, back-breaking struggle for subsistence.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, we need the help of others to fully realise the potential of our rational and cognitive powers. Think, for example, of the musician playing in an orchestra, or a physicist participating in the experiments at CERN. Both individuals supersede their personal limits.

Something interesting happens when we engage in these collective activities. We begin to feel a deep sympathy and empathy for the other participants in these activities. We call this friendship and it gives us a new set of motivations and desires, namely: desires for the well-being of others.

4. Political Activity
This leads us finally to the Aristotelian view of politics. Aristotle argued that flourishing can only be achieved in a properly-constituted political system.

Aristotle's most radical proposals (for the era) were in favour of compulsory public education and some system of welfare. The educational system would give people the training they need to utilise their rational and cognitive powers, while the welfare system would give people access to the materials they need to survive. Both are necessary preconditions for flourishing.

Turning to the question of governance, Aristotle advocates an egalitarian and democratic system. Every citizen has a vote in a citizen assembly that elects executive officials, and these officials can only hold office for a specified period of time. This prevents the concentration of power in one person or group of persons. This is in stark contrast to the political system of Plato, which envisioned governance by an elite (nb: there is some elitism in Aristotle due to his prejudices against women and slaves -- more on this in the next part).


5. Virtue and Vice
So there you have it: an Aristotelian vision of the good life. And as can be seen it is wholly secular. One final point that is worth raising is Aristotle's thoughts about the consequences of living the good life.

He does not think that the person who lives the good life will be morally vicious. For to truly exercise one's rational and cognitive powers, one must achieve an appropriate balance between competing moral vices.

For instance, one will not be cowardly or rash but will display courage and valour; one will not be profligate or insensible, but will display temperance and self-control; one will not be obsequious or sulkily insular, but will display friendliness and compassion; and so on.

This is the famous idea of the Aristotelian mean.

That's it for now, in part two we will see how practicable the Aristotelian model is in real life.

Wielenberg on the Meaning of Life (Part 1)

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Albert Camus began his famous meditation on the absurd, The Myth of Sisyphus, with a rather pointed observation:

There is but one truly serious philosophical question, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest - whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories - comes afterwards.

There is some force to this. We live such tiny lives, rounded by a sleep, that we had better figure out if they are worth living in the short time we have available to us.

 Of course, the most popular suggestion is that life derives its meaning from God. But how could this be? And can there be meaning in the absence of God?

Erik Wielenberg's book Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe tries to answer those questions. As the title suggests, his goal is to show how meaning can exist without God but in the course of making this argument he has to deal with the theistic position.

The book is richer than I can hope to do justice to here. But an overview of the introductory chapter will give some flavour of his approach to the topic.


1. What is Meaning?
Wielenberg begins by distinguishing between three possible conceptions of the meaning of life.

The first, illustrated by the apology of Socrates and implicit in most religious views, is that of supernatural meaning. The idea here is that life only has meaning if some supernatural being has conferred or imbued with meaning.

The second is that of external meaning. The idea here is that life has meaning if it brings about some good that is external to the life of the agent. This good need not be supernatural nor rely on any supernatural forces. For example, alleviating the suffering of others might be said to give external meaning to your life.

Finally, there is the concept of internal meaning. A life can be said to have internal meaning when it is meaningful to the agent who lives it, when that agent derives satisfaction from what they do, irrespective of external or supernatural significance.


2. Meaning without God?
Having introduced those three conceptions, Wielenberg then considers four arguments suggesting that life without God has no meaning.

The first of these, arguably the most intuitive, can be called the final outcome argument. The infamous William Lane Craig likes to emphasise this one. The following being a representative quote:

If there is no God, then man and the universe are doomed. Like prisoners condemned to death row, we stand and simply wait for our unavoidable execution. If there is no God, and there is no immortality, then what is the consequence of this? It means that the life that we do have is ultimately absurd.

We may wish to quibble with the loaded analogy -- even if we are ultimately "executed" our lives are not necessarily like those of death row prisoners -- but the vision here is clear. Life is seen to be a sequence of events or stages, and what meaning it has derives from the final stage in the sequence. According to the theist, the final stage is our immortal union with God; according to the atheist the final stage is oblivion. WLC thinks it obvious that the former has meaning but the latter does not.

Before moving on to the next argument, I cannot help but include a bit of Shakespeare. Here is the famous "Seven Ages of Man" speech from As You Like It. It captures the vision of life just outlined:



The second argument, which is implicit in the quote from Craig, is the pointless existence argument. Craig acknowledges that immortality would not be enough to give life meaning. Instead, some criteria for establishing what a successful life would look like need to be set by a supernatural being. This being assigns purposes to our lives and judges whether we fail or succeed in fulfilling them.

The third argument comes with a self-explanatory title: the nobody of significance cares argument. Wielenberg takes this from a paper by Susan Wolf. The basic idea is that a life has to mean something to someone of more intrinsic worth that oneself. In other words, it has to mean something to God.

The final argument is the God as the source of ethics argument. To appreciate this argument we need to revisit the idea of external meaning. It was said that making the world a better place could give life with some meaning. But in order to do this one must operate from the correct moral foundation. If God's existence is necessary for the existence of morality, then a universe without God could never be made "better".

The premises of this final argument have been discussed many times on this blog (see the various articles on morality and religion in the table of contents) and Wielenberg dedicates subsequent chapters of his book to it. The remainder of Chapter 1 explores some potential non-theistic responses to the first three arguments. We will consider these in part 2.