Aristotle was a very down-to-earth philosopher. He is always contrasted with Plato in that sense. Aristotle said we should trust observation over theory, and trust theory only if it matches up with the observable world. We should be wary of getting lost in the abstract world of the intellect. Believe in what you can see, not in what you can imagine. Most of Aristotle’s work was much closer to what we would nowadays describe as science, rather than philosophy, and this scientific approach is carried through all of his thought. If you want to understand something, look first, think after. That might be a good slogan for Aristotle’s approach.
So what do we see when we look at the world? Well, we see a lot of things. We see various objects, places, people, activities, qualities and quantities, properties and principles…it’s a bit of a mess and can get very complicated. How can we tidy up our observations of the world, such that we can make some sense of what we are looking at, abiding by our ‘look first, think after’ principle? Think what you do when you are trying to tidy a messy desk or a room. A first step might be to organise what we find into various ‘types’ or ‘kinds’ or, to use the Aristotelian word, categories.
The word ‘category’ comes from Aristotelian philosophy, via an Ancient Greek root word that means something like ‘to accuse’ or more colloquially ‘to point the finger at’. When Aristotle starts to tidy up our observations of the world, his first step is to group things together according to the principle of what we ‘point the finger at’ and say something like ‘that is a…’. So we point at a horse and say ‘that is a horse’. We point at a man and say ‘that is a man’. We point at a shoe and say ‘that is a shoe’. Etc.
On closer inspection, we see that we can also point at the qualities of these things: ‘That is a brown horse.’ ‘That is a tall man.’ ‘That is a brown shoe.’ Note, we now observe that there is something ‘pointed at’ that is common to both the shoe and the horse; namely, that they are brown. So we have discovered a new type of thing that we ‘point the finger at’: in this case, not an object, but a colour. And we can also point at blue and say ‘that is a colour’, and yellow, red, etc.
These things that we can ‘point at’ in a lot of different instances – such as the brownness in brown shoes, brown horses, brown curtains, etc. – are called ‘universals’. The idea of a ‘horse’ is also a universal, because there are lots of horses, in a horse race for example, and we can point at any of them and say ‘that is a horse, and that is a horse, and that one, and that one too’, etc. These ‘universals’ can be contrasted to those things that we only ‘point at’ and say of one individual, such as when we point at the winning horse, or if I point at my brother Jack and say ‘that is my brother Jack’; these are called ‘particulars’.
The difference between universals and particulars shows us that some of these types of things we ‘point at’ or ‘say of’ seem to extend more broadly than others; sometimes very widely, such as ‘that is a physical object’, sometimes so narrowly that it is confined to one particular instance. It’s ‘said of’ a winning horse that it is that horse (we tend to use proper names to identify particulars), but also that it is a winning horse; and also that it is a horse, and a mammal, and a living thing, and a physical thing. But not all physical things are living things, not all living things are mammals, not all mammals are horses, not all horses are winning horses, and not all winning horses are that winning horse. We end up with a hierarchy of kinds of things we ‘point at’ or ‘say of’ other things. At the bottom of the hierarchy are individual objects: these are the narrowest possible terms. At the top of the hierarchy, Aristotle places what he calls the ‘Categories’. These are the points at which you cannot go higher in the hierarchy of what is ‘said of’ or ‘pointed at’. They are the broadest possible terms. He identifies ten of these categories: Substance, quantity, quality, relatives, somewhere, sometime, being in a position, having, acting, and being acted upon.
Swiftly we are getting into complicated territory, and Aristotelian metaphysics is very complicated territory. (If ever you needed an example of how philosophy understands ‘clarity’ to be a virtue of thought but not necessarily of style or expression, you should read Aristotle’s metaphysics and understand that it is an example of truly great philosophy.) To cut a long story short, Aristotle observes what we ‘point at’ and ‘say of’ various objects and organises them into various groups, following the hierarchy of what is ‘said of’ to the top and eventually settling on these categories as being definitive of what it means to understand the world. And that’s it. As complicated as it becomes, it remains very economical: we only talk about what we can observe in the world. What this means is that there is nothing more that we need to find in order to understand the world or anything in it; everything we need it right in front of us. We don’t need to drift off into some other-worldly realm of Forms. We just need to apply the right categories.
These might sound like dry and unhelpful technical details in a book that is trying not to get bogged down in dry and unhelpful technical details. But Aristotle’s metaphysical method has important real-world consequences once you follow them through. And so you must be brave and persevere, because we have one more technical detail to cover in order to get to Aristotle’s ethics. The bridge between Aristotle’s metaphysics and his ethics is his theory of causation.
Causation
What is it for something to ‘cause’ something else? This is a very difficult question to answer. No science or philosophy has yet really settled the question, in fact, and it remains a topic of serious debate now and for the future. We will leave that debate for the metaphysicians and focus on Aristotle’s version.
Being now familiar with Aristotle’s down-to-earth approach, we can start to make some progress in answering this question. We need to look before we think. So when I look at, for example, a shoe, and I ask ‘what caused that shoe?’, ‘why that shoe?’, ‘why any shoe at all?’, I find I can ‘point at’ and say various things that explain why that shoe exists.
Firstly, I can point to the stuff that the shoe is made of: it is made of leather, for example. If it were made of water, it wouldn’t be a shoe, but a puddle. So the ‘material’ that something is made of in some sense explains why that thing is as it is. Aristotle calls this the ‘material cause’.
But being made of shoe-like-stuff is not enough to make a shoe, it also needs to be arranged in the right way. If leather is cut into a strip and laid flat, with a buckle at one end, such that it fits around the waist, then it becomes a belt, not a shoe. So the ‘material’ also needs to be in the right arrangement, shape, or ‘form’. Aristotle calls this the ‘formal’ cause.
Thirdly, these things don’t just happen on their own, something (or someone) needs to take the material and arrange it in the correct form. In this case, we need some kind of shoemaker to make a shoe out of the raw materials. Or for natural phenomena, we need some kind of physical cause to exert itself on an object for it to change: rain needs to fall, or snow and ice needs to melt, in order for floodwaters to rise. Aristotle calls this kind of thing the ‘efficient cause’, and it is the most intuitive notion of causation nowadays since it is the one most aligned with science. Most of science investigates efficient causes, rather than anything else, and we have all adopted that norm.
It is an impoverished norm, however, because there is one final type of causation that Aristotle finds that has not yet been mentioned. A shoemaker takes shoe-type material and arranges it in shoe-type form, but why? Why does the shoemaker arrange shoe-type material into the shoe-type form? What causes them to do so? Whatever answer comes to this kind of question will be Aristotle’s fourth and final notion of cause: what he calls the ‘final cause’. This is the purpose of the shoe. It is the answer to the question of why the shoemaker takes the shoe-type material and arranges it into the shoe-type form. It’s because someone wanted to buy and wear some shoes! And someone wanted to wear shoes because they serve a particular purpose that the person values: in this case, to protect the feet and look super.
Aristotle says that each of the four types of causation are required in order to really understand what something is: you need to know a) what something is made of, b) the way that stuff is arranged or formed, c) the thing or process that formed it that way, and d) why. This doesn’t just apply to people and their desire for footwear but also to natural phenomena. Stones roll down hills because a) the are made of stone-stuff (if they were helium they would float away); b) they are arranged in stone-form (if they were flat they would not roll); c) they were pushed, or had their position disrupted in some way (if nothing changes, they don’t move on their own…); and d) they have a natural tendency to ‘fall’. Aristotle didn’t have the benefit of knowing about gravity and such like, so expressed this natural tendency in terms of the stone having an innate purpose or drive or will to fall to earth, as it tries to return to its ‘natural place in the universe’. It’s as if the stone wants to fall. It’s not correct, of course, but we can forgive him for that. If you read this as a colourful way of describing the nature of a stone, he wasn’t so far wrong.
(This, incidentally, is why the geocentric model of the solar system, which placed the earth at the centre of the universe, remained so entrenched for so long in human history. It has almost nothing to do with religious texts or the observation of the planets but everything to do with the fact that in Aristotle’s metaphysics, heavy things have a natural tendency to fall. And in the void of space, in which there is no up or down or left or right, where do things ‘fall’? They fall as far as they can, which is to the middle. Hence, the earth, the ‘heavy’ stuff, falls to the centre, and so the earth must be at the centre of the universe. In order to reject that claim you would need to reject Aristotle’s metaphysics, and for the longest time there simply wasn’t an alternative metaphysics available. I like to think Aristotle would have been really pleased to find his metaphysics ultimately rejected on the basis of the observations of astronomers. As he said, we should trust theory only if it conforms to the available observations.)
Purpose is Everywhere
Because understanding the ‘purpose’ of something is essential to understanding what that thing is, Aristotle looked for and found purpose everywhere. He found the whole natural world to be imbued with an innate purposiveness, such that leaves on plants grow in order to provide shade for the fruit, fish have gills for the purpose of breathing underwater, predators’ teeth were sharp for the purpose of biting into prey, and stones fell for their purpose of returning to their natural place in the universe. Obviously, we live in a post-Darwin and post-Newton world, so we understand a lot of this to be profoundly mistaken and back-to-front. Predators’ teeth are not sharp for the purpose of hunting prey; predators’ teeth are sharp because of a long process of evolution in which those predators that did not have sufficiently sharp teeth had a harder time of it and so lost out in the game of natural selection. Only the winners remain, with sharp teeth, but they (and their attributes) remain there by chance, not by purpose.
But whilst his theories might be factually incorrect when it comes to explaining the features of the natural world, there is something philosophically important in Aristotle’s idea that ‘purposiveness’ can be essential to understanding something. This is an idea that doesn’t find a happy home in most scientific theory, which limits itself to efficient causes only. Reflection on Aristotle’s theory of causation can remind us of some important down-to-earth truths.
We could describe the physical movement of a person as being caused by their brain sending out certain electrical signals, which then travelled down nerves to the muscles, activating those muscles in a particular sequence, which caused the person’s body to travel from point A to point B. Or we could say that they wanted to go and talk to someone attractive at the other side of the pub. The former description restricts itself to talking about only ‘efficient causation’, as a good scientific picture would; the latter allows ‘final causation’, or purpose, into its picture. These descriptions are not mutually exclusive, but I would say that only one of them has a chance of being ethically relevant to how we live our lives. (And it’s not the one about the brain sending signals…)
If we allow ‘purposiveness’ into our metaphysics, our picture of the world, we allow ourselves to say that in order to truly understand ourselves and why we do things, we must understand our purposes. We must understand ourselves as essentially purposeful creatures. It’s not enough to know what our brains and bodies are doing, we also need to know why. Knowing that there is purpose in our lives, and what those purposes might be, is a very good starting point for achieving some kind of understanding about what it is to live well.
The Purpose of Life
What is ‘Good’? What is ‘justice’? We have seen from Socrates and Plato that these are very difficult questions to answer, requiring an almost other-worldly kind of wisdom. Not so for Aristotle, whose method, with which we are now familiar, brings us right down-to-earth. What is ‘Good’? Well, look around, what do you point at and say ‘that is good’?
That is a good car. That is a good view. That is a good job. That was a good investment. This is a good song. That was a good move. That was a good game. This is a good restaurant. They are a good cook. That is good food. I had a good time. You are a good person. That is a good dog. Socrates is a good example of a philosopher. That is a good argument. That was a good decision.
We could go on and on, but we won’t. The first thing we observe is that there are as many varieties of ‘good’ as there are things we describe as ‘good’. On the face of it, a good car has nothing in common with a good cook. Draw up a quick list of things that make a good cook and also a list of things that make a good car and I think you’d struggle to find much overlap. And yet they are both accurately called ‘good’. Now try to do the same comparison between a good cook and a good move in chess: you will find such a comparison barely makes sense, such is the difference between the two things.
You might think the obvious issue with this example is that cars and cooks and games of chess are very different things. But whether something is accurately called ‘good’ will depend on a range of different criteria, not only what kind of thing it is. Even if we limited ourselves to just one thing – a good car, say – we would still find differences depending on criteria such as: a) the purpose of the thing (a good car does not break down, but many a much-loved classic is not all that reliable), b) the context of the thing (what makes a good car on a race track might be very different from on the road), or even just c) the person doing the appraising (some people value fuel economy in a car, others want raw power).
The only principle in common to all here is that the ‘goodness’ of a thing is determined in relation to its purpose, relative to the individual who is doing the appraising. What is ‘good’, for you, depends on what you want. If you want to cut wood, you need a good saw. The saw is ‘good’ to the extent that it fulfils its purpose of cutting wood. If you want to cut wood easily and efficiently, then you need a sharp and well-made saw. A saw is better the easier and more efficiently it cuts the wood. But its ‘goodness’ is determined only by the purpose that it is serving, relative to you, the one who is using it.
This simple principle makes sense of all the diversity of ‘goods’ that we identified in our first observations. If you want a fast car, then a car is ‘good’ to the extent that it is ‘fast’. If you want an economical car, then a car is ‘good’ to the extent that it is ‘economical’. Essentially, does it serve your purposes? If yes, then it is ‘good’; if no, then it is not.
And these purposes are relative to individuals. Consider food: what counts as ‘good food’? For some, this means healthy food, full of nutrition and wholesomeness. Junk food is bad food, just empty calories. It serves no purpose!
For others, however, ‘good food’ is tasty food. When you choose your favourite food, you choose the thing that you most enjoy eating. Health concerns take a back seat. And tasty food comes in various forms. For some people, tasty food means fine dining, a gourmet meal, a delicate and varied tasting menu prepared by a top chef. For others, tasty food means a takeaway from the local pizza place. Both are accurately described as ‘good food’, if by that you mean ‘something I enjoy eating’; it depends on the individual and their purposes.
Even as individuals we find that our purposes and preferences change depending on context. Sometimes we might want healthy food, even if it’s not that tasty; sometimes we want something tasty, even if it’s not that healthy. It depends on what our purposes are at that time.
And even if we settled on a stable definition of what ‘good food’ was – say, because we decide that the true purpose of food is to provide nourishment, and healthy food provides the most nutrition, therefore healthy food is ‘good food’ – even then we would find huge differences between individuals. Consider the nutritional requirements of a top athlete versus those of a sedentary office worker. What counts as ‘good’ for one might be ludicrously inappropriate for the other. If we forced both to take the same compromised option, the athlete would be under-fuelled and the sedentary office worker would be obese.
Even if we confined ourselves within athletes, consider the different requirements of a Tour de France cyclist compared to a bodybuilder. One requires as much carbohydrate as possible; the other as little as possible. They are both ‘good’ athletes eating ‘good’ diets, but they are totally different. What is good for one is bad for the other because they have very different purposes.
The Chief Good
Aristotle sees all this variation and concludes that there manifestly cannot be one universal idea of ‘good’ that applies to all things at all times to all people. To go looking for it is a waste of time. Instead, we have a much more adaptable and down-to-earth idea that what is ‘good’ depends on the individual and their purposes. Wisdom is nothing more than being able to recognise what your purposes are, relative to who you are. The wise bodybuilder eats a lot of protein. The wise Tour de France cyclist eats a lot of carbohydrates. The wise sedentary office worker restricts their calorie consumption and tries to do a bit more exercise, but also enjoys a good pizza once in a while.
The only thing that we can say is common to them all is just that they have purposes. These are the broadest possible terms: We are all purpose-driven creatures. We all do things ‘for the sake of’ something. Bodybuilders eat protein to grow their muscles, Tour de France cyclists eat carbohydrates to give themselves energy, sedentary office workers restrict their calorie consumption to avoid being fat, but also eat pizza because they enjoy it and what’s even the point of working in an office if you can’t enjoy a pizza once in a while…
Just as with Aristotle’s hierarchy of categories, it seems that some of these purposes extend more widely than others. A bodybuilder eats protein for the purpose of building their muscles, but why do they build their muscles? To get bigger and stronger? To win competitions? The Tour de France cyclist eats a lot of carbohydrate for the purpose of giving themselves energy, but why do they need that energy? To perform well in the race and maybe win the competition? Now we observe that there is a purpose common to both the bodybuilder and the Tour de France cyclist: to win a competition.
And why do they want to win the competition? For money, for fame, for glory? Why do they want these things? Why does the sedentary office worker want to not be fat, but also enjoy a pizza? What is the purpose of these purposes?
What we are looking for here is what Aristotle calls the ‘Chief Good’; that is, the thing for the sake of which we do other things; the purpose of all purposes. This, he thinks, is happiness, or ‘living well’, because we always aim for happiness for its own sake, but we never aim for happiness for the sake of anything else. People aim for wealth and fame because they think it will make them happy. They do not aim for happiness because they think it will make them wealthy and famous. Wealth and fame are not valuable in themselves; they are only valuable because they lead to other things, such as happiness or the ability to live well. Happiness, on the other hand, is valuable and desirable in itself, even if it doesn’t lead to anything else. Happiness is at the top of the hierarchy of purposes: it is the ‘highest kind’ of purpose; it is the ‘why’ or the ‘that for the sake of which’ other things are done. It is, therefore, the final cause in our understanding of our various purposes.
(It’s worth clarifying that when Aristotle says that the ‘Chief Good’, the purpose of purposes, is ‘happiness’, what he actually says is eudaimonia. This is often translated as ‘happiness’, but he means more than simply ‘feeling good’ or ‘pleasure’. Something is lost in translation. Whilst English-speakers tend to understand happiness to be something that you feel, rather than something that is done – we say you feel happy or are happy, but we don’t say that you do happy – for Aristotle it would make some sense to say that to get or achieve eudaimonia is to do a certain thing. And whilst happiness is something that you experience, a good life is something that is done, so perhaps ‘a good life’ is a better translation for eudaimonia, except that it’s not very informative. In truth, rather like Plato’s ‘Forms’,eudaimoniais a distinct Aristotelian term of art: the word means what Aristotle says it means. And when he describes it, it’s clear that eudaimonia is not only about being happy but also about ‘living well’ or what is sometimes translated as ‘flourishing’. We want to live well and not just live pleasantly. It’s not enough to feel like your life is good, it actually needs to be good. To have a good life, you need happiness in proportion to virtue; to be happy and deserve it. And Aristotle’s understanding of virtue is not just moral virtue but extends to all forms of ‘excellence’. In short: you want to be an excellent human being living an excellent life. This is what Aristotle means when he speaks of eudaimonia, the purpose of purposes, and it is clearly more than just ‘happiness’ or ‘feeling good’.)
What is Happiness?
So if everything we do, we do for the sake of happiness, what is happiness? What is it to live well? What is it we are aiming for? Aristotle’s answer here depends on his metaphysical categories. That’s enough to put some people off. But even if we are not on board with his metaphysical reasoning, the answer he gives is profoundly insightful and has been tremendously influential. It’s very much worth some serious consideration.
Let’s begin by outlining Aristotle’s metaphysical reasoning, before we get on to his answer. Maybe you won’t find it so off-putting after all. Recall that Aristotle traced the hierarchy of what we ‘point at’ and ‘say of’ various things up to the top and called the highest kind of ‘pointing at’ the categories. One of these categories is called ‘substance’, a later Latin-rooted translation of what Aristotle would have called ousia, which can also be translated as ‘essence’. The word itself doesn’t matter as much as the meaning. Substances (or essences) are what make up the world, literally ‘standing beneath’ (sub-stance) what we perceive to exist. There is more dense metaphysical discussion of the notion of ‘substance’ than we can possibly cover here, so we will take a short cut. (Metaphysicians and Heideggerians, forgive me.)
Basically, sometimes we point at stuff and say ‘that is a thing’. Substances are these things or types of thing. So we point at ‘Socrates’ and say ‘that is Socrates’; hence, Socrates is a ‘substance’. But Socrates is also a human; we can point at Socrates and say ‘that is a human’; so ‘human’ is a substance too. And a human is an animal, so ‘animal’ is a substance. And an animal is a living thing, so ‘living thing’ is a substance. And a living thing is a physical thing, so ‘physical thing’ is a substance. Depending on where you draw the line of what you can point at and say ‘that is a thing or a distinct type of thing’, you will eventually get to a point where you have categorised all the various kind of ‘substances’ that there are. Some people stop at physical things – these people are called ‘physicalists’ – some people allow for immaterial things, like souls or gods or numbers.
So what is the ‘substance’ that is Socrates? Well, Socrates is Socrates (and only Socrates is Socrates, which makes him a primary substance in Aristotle’s system), but Socrates is also a human being. What is a human being, according to Aristotle? What defines what it is to be human? Aristotle’s categories provide the definitive answer; as they must, because the categories are made up only from what we can observe.
Aristotle’s theory works from the ground up: we should trust observation over theory, and trust theory only if it conforms to observation. Because of this, we know the information about what it is to be human is to be found in those categories somewhere. We just need to think it through to make sense of our observations.
Here is the method: Start from the top of the hierarchy and work your way down, identifying the relevant observable difference as you go (to be fair to Aristotle, you’ll have to imagine you only have access to the observations that would have been possible for an Ancient Greek; which means no MRI scans or DNA tests or the like):
Socrates is a physical thing. We observe that some physical things move about (like planets in the sky) and some don’t (like the earth beneath your feet); so physical things can be either mobile or immobile; Socrates moves about, so he is a mobile physical thing. Mobile physical things can be eternal (like atoms) or destructible (like living things); Socrates ages, dies, and decomposes, so Socrates is a destructible mobile physical thing. Destructible mobile physical things can be ensouled (showing signs of life, like living things) or unensouled (not showing signs of life, like inanimate objects); Socrates was alive, so Socrates is an ensouled destructible mobile physical thing. Ensouled destructible mobile physical things can either be capable of perception (such as animals), or incapable of perception (such as plants); Socrates was capable of perception, so Socrates is an ensouled destructible mobile physical thing that is capable of perception. Ensouled destructible mobile physical things that are capable of perception can either be rational (like humans) or not rational (like non-human animals); Socrates was rational, so Socrates is a rational ensouled destructible mobile physical thing that is capable of perception. This, we find, is what it is to be human.
It’s difficult to be inspired by that definition; it is, admittedly, a little dry. But it has extremely important implications for Aristotle’s conception of what it is to live well.
Recall, what is ‘good’ is determined by purposes relative to individuals. To understand what it is to live well, we are looking for the ‘purpose of purposes’, the purpose that all human beings have, which we have said is ‘happiness’. As with all purposes, this is relative to the individual who has it. In this case, we are asking what the ‘purpose of purposes’ is for any human being. So we are asking what it is to ‘live well’ for a human being. We would clearly expect a very different answer if we were asking about what it means to ‘live well’ as a plant.
Aristotle’s great insight is that what it means to ‘live well’ is relative to what kind of thing you are. So what it means to ‘live well’ or ‘flourish’ as a plant means something very different than it would to a human being, because plants are very different kinds of things to human beings. Likewise, what it means to ‘live well’ as a lion or an antelope will be very different from what it means to live well as a human being, because human beings are very different from lions and antelopes. And, indeed, lions and antelopes are very different from each other, so what it means to ‘live well’ will be very different for them too.
One conclusion presents itself: what it is to ‘live well’ as a human being will be partly defined by what it is to be a human being. And we have just defined what it is to be a human being: to be human is to be a rational ensouled destructible mobile physical thing that is capable of perception. We share almost all of this with a non-rational ensouled destructible mobile physical thing that is capable of perception (i.e., a non-human animal), but we, as humans, have one distinct feature: our rationality.
Humans think; we are conscious; we reason. This, both for Aristotle and for many who have come after him, is what defines our ‘substance’, our ‘essence’ as human beings. We are rational animals.
So if what it means to live well as a human depends on what it is to be a human being, and what it is to be a human being is to be rational, then what it is to live well depends on being rational. The exercise of reason, through philosophy, is essential to living well as a human being. Philosophy is necessary for happiness.
Once again we echo Socrates: ‘The unexamined life is not worthy of a human being.’ Aristotle has taken yet another very different route – different from Plato yet still much more metaphysical than Socrates would have contemplated – but their destination is the same. Philosophy is essential to living well as a human being.
What comes next, Aristotle’s Ethics, is what Aristotle finds once he applies this philosophical reason to the questions of human life. Many of his insights are extremely practical and helpful. But it’s important not to lose sight of the underlying point: regardless of the answers that you find to the questions of ‘how to live well’, it’s essential that you ask those questions and ask them in the right way. The answers will probably change over time, across different societies, and amongst different individuals, because we are all very different and the world is a changeable place. Purposes change all the time. But what we are as human beings does not change all that much. We still have purposes, and reason, and we can apply that reason to evaluate those purposes.
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