Given the avowedly practical nature of Aristotle’s ethical philosophy, there is endless opportunity to construct examples that show how it can be applied. It could be a book in itself, or an endlessly-updating blog. All variations would have the same structure though, showing a) how too much or too little of a good thing is always a bad thing, so you should find and choose the happy middle, b) where the happy middle is will depend on your individual nature and circumstances, and c) you must make efforts and practise in order to move yourself closer to the happy middle.
Further, the relevance of any of these will be determined by your individual purposes. If you are a bodybuilder, it’s relevant to you to determine where the happy middle is, for you, between over-training and under-training, but this is hardly relevant to anyone not bodybuilding. And bodybuilding is just one purpose: it should be clear by now, with Aristotle’s ‘point the finger at’ method, that we can find as many different purposes as we care to look for, if we care to look.
I will retreat, once again, to some representative examples and leave you to fill in the gaps for yourself. Perhaps the examples themselves will ring true for you, perhaps they won’t. You will need your own examples. Apply the structure and the method of reflection to your life and I am sure you will find it applicable.
Practical Lesson #1: Aim for the middle (not the top)
Whatever it is we are aiming for, we tend to think that we need to always do our best, to aim for the top, or to excel. What Aristotle reminds us is that this is not necessarily the ideal. The ideal is often somewhere in the middle. There must always be limits to our efforts and achievements. Even the top performers, whilst talking about ‘giving it their all’, know when to ease back and pace themselves. If they push themselves too hard, they will burn out before the finish line. Like the archer analogy, if you pull the bow too much, you will overshoot the target.
What you need to aim for, to achieve your purposes, is to be good enough. And that is a very broad spectrum with a very wide margin for error. Because of this, if you feel like you are not achieving your aims, often it is not due to any fault or lack of effort on your part: it might be because your aims are unreasonable. The solution is not to try harder, aim higher, find more determination to push through to success, etc. The solution to your dissatisfaction might be to ease back, take your time, and take a longer view. Life is a marathon with only occasional sprints, and the wise runner runs to their own pace.
So many self-help theories seem to miss this point. The aim is not to be totally happy, successful, confident, liked, admired, etc., etc. That is a stupid and unachievable aim that does not exist. And even if we got it, we would probably hate it, or else be hated. The aim is to be happy enough, successful enough, confident enough. The vast majority of us are probably already in our happy middle, but we don’t realise it because we are constantly told we need to aim higher and have more. We would be better served by aligning ourselves with what we are and recognising that we are already achieving our aims, we already have enough. It’s good to work on your flaws, but it’s stupid to make flaws out of nothing.
Practical Lesson #2: The ‘middle’ is relative to you as an individual
Some people are naturally shy. Some people are naturally confident. It’s too easy to see only one of these as a problem. But both need to aim for the middle. Too much confidence is really irritating and likely to lead you into trouble. Too little confidence is debilitating and likely to prevent you from being able to take opportunities in life. Often we mistakenly think that more confidence is always a good thing; we think this because it’s more pleasant to be confident than shy. It’s especially easy to think this if you are naturally shy, because so much in your life would seem to be improved simply by having more confidence. But it’s important to remember that having some shyness is a good thing. The goal is to balance it with confidence. So if you have too much shyness, you should aim for more confidence, but you should not aim (or expect) to get all the confidence. It wouldn’t be good for you.
Likewise, if you are blessed with confidence, you should probably aim to temper that confidence with some humility. If you don’t, you are likely to face the consequences of too much confidence: such as rubbing some people up the wrong way, blundering out of your depth, over-reaching, or making a fool of yourself. It’s your choice, but the wise person would be wary of these things.
If you are naturally shy, it would be foolhardy to aim to be totally confident. You may as well be five-foot tall and try to be an Olympic rower. You need to play the hand you are dealt. So if you are naturally shy, the happy middle, for you, is to be just a little bit more confident. Confident enough so it’s not debilitating, but you don’t need to be the performing extravert. Be comfortable within yourself. Align your will with your nature. This will place you much lower down on the spectrum of confidence than someone that is naturally confident, but that is still the right place for you to be.
If you are naturally confident, however, it would be foolhardy to try to be totally humble. But you probably need to temper your confidence with enough humility to avoid the pitfalls of arrogance.
Practical Lesson #3: You need to get by
It’s much easier to live well when life is easy and pleasant. It’s harder to live well when life is hard and unpleasant. Aristotle recognises this, considering it perfectly natural, and so recommends that we make it a priority to achieve a position of relative comfort and security. Essentially, we need to get by in the world: we need to have some wealth so that we can buy things, some practical skills so that we can do useful things, and the support of some good friends and family, etc. These things rarely happen by accident, so we need to make positive efforts to get them, continuing those efforts in order to keep them. The most important aspect of this is education. We need it, and we need to provide it for others. Without the right education, life will always be hard (unless you are very lucky).
Even with education, it’s still necessary to make something of yourself. This requires a personal investment of effort. There is no escaping this (unless you are very lucky).
Practical Lesson #4: Be true to your nature
Virtues are relative to purposes, and purposes are relative to your nature, therefore your virtues are relative to your nature. What it means to be virtuous is to be you to the best and truest degree. We’ve already seen that this means finding the happy middle, for you, for each of your virtues. But it also determines what is virtuous for you.
A philosopher is most virtuous when they are philosophising well; a doctor is most virtuous when they are healing people; a teacher is most virtuous when they are teaching people; a farmer is most virtuous when they are tending to their land or livestock; an athlete is most virtuous when they are training, or else competing (winning is not necessary); etc., etc. These are totally different lives with totally different activities, yet they are all ‘virtuous’ because they are doing what they do best.
Find out what you are, find out what you do best and are best-suited to doing, then do it. Do what you feel has the most and highest purpose. If it does not make you happy, then it is evidently not achieving your purposes and so is not what you are best-suited to do; so do something else. Whatever you find, for you, to be what you are best-suited to do, that will determine what a virtuous life looks like for you. It might look very different from the lives of others: if you are a philosopher, you might be poor and anonymous; but what does a philosopher care for wealth and fame? If you are an athlete, you might not have as much time for study, and so might get worse grades than your fellow students; but what does an athlete care for grades? If you are a farmer, you might be looked down on and taken for granted by city-folk; but what does a farmer care for the opinions of city-folk, so long as the land and livestock are healthy and happy?
What you are determines your purpose, and your purpose determines the value in your life. Align these well and you will be doing exactly what you ought to be doing.
Practical Lesson #5: Conquer your known world
This isn’t so much a practical lesson as an illustration of the practicality of Aristotle’s lessons. Aristotle was a student of Plato, and Plato was one of a generation of students of Socrates, along with others like Antisthenes and Xenophon. As a rule, when you follow the teaching of a philosopher like Socrates or Plato or Antisthenes, you become a philosopher. What happens when you follow Aristotle’s teaching?
Aristotle teaches that it’s important to get on in the world. You need to flourish as a human being and ensure that you have the means to do so. Much of this is not in your control, it’s true: you cannot control what nature you are born into, healthy and rich and strong or sickly and poor and weak. You cannot control whether you receive the right education. But once you have been gifted with a healthy body and mind, a sound education, and adequate material resources, the rest is up to you. The rest is a product of your choices. What would you choose to be, if you could choose to be anything?
According to Aristotle’s philosophy, you would choose to achieve the highest degree of excellence possible for you, because this is the way you fulfil your purposes and so be happy. You will set out into life, face its challenges, and you will conquer whatever you find. This proved to be all too true for one of Aristotle’s students: a young prince of Macedonia called Alexander. Aristotle tutored the teenage Alexander for only a few years, but by all accounts Aristotle’s influence was profound. Once the young prince became a young king, he set out to flourish in excellence as a king, and conquered most of the known world before he reached thirty years old.
Whilst Aristotle’s followers looked to distance themselves from Alexander the Great’s later tyrannical tendencies, there’s no denying that Aristotle’s influence had some part to play in the formation of Alexander’s character and approach. This influence is practical as well as philosophical, in that much of Alexander’s political organisation, of his cities (old and new) and the empire as a whole, shows a markedly Aristotelian method. The knowledge exchange was mutual: Aristotle might have equipped Alexander with the political know-how to facilitate the organisation of an empire, but Alexander returned the favour by sending any new-found scientific discoveries from conquered distant lands back to Greece. This body of knowledge was collated under Alexander’s empire, and after the empire fragmented following Alexander’s death, it eventually took form as the Great Library of Alexandria.
There is a temptation to see Alexander the Great as an embodiment of that old Platonic ideal of the philosopher king; an Aristotelian ‘great soul’ who excels in every degree and yet values knowledge above all else. This is a false temptation. More accurate seem to be the stories that speak only of the young Alexander’s lust for glory. Plutarch (a Greek philosopher of the 1st century CE) writes that the young Alexander wept, on hearing a philosopher theorise about the existence of multiple worlds, because there were so many worlds out there and he hadn’t even conquered one. Plutarch also writes that the princely Alexander was annoyed whenever his kingly father conquered a city, because he wasn’t leaving enough for Alexander to conquer when his time came!
(A brief word on some famous words: ‘And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.’ The villain Hans Gruber says this in the film Die Hard, snobbishly citing ‘the benefits of a classical education’.No one knows what kind of education that could be, however, because it’s a very made up quotation. British readers might be familiar with the closest ‘classical’ origin of Hans Gruber’s wording, from the legendary sports commentator Sid Waddell, speaking in the mid-eighties of a champion darts player called Eric Bristow: ‘When Alexander of Macedonia was 33, he cried salt tears because there were no more worlds to conquer. Bristow’s only 27.’ Classic words, surely; classical words, surely not.)
In the end Aristotle’s followers consider Alexander to be a cautionary tale: he began well, perhaps, but became a tyrant, corrupted by power and his natural lust for glory, prone to excess and unable to hold to the happy middle. He conquered everything, but not himself. Along the way there were some signs of a positive Aristotelian philosophical influence. For example, Alexander had very many and very varied cities, but in all their difference they were all united under a kind of universal purposiveness that was his empire. Alexander didn’t impose one standard of ‘goodness’ on every city – like the British Empire’s pernicious tendency to ‘make the world England’, to quote another great movie line – but recognised that what would be good for each city would depend on its nature. He allowed each city to preserve its nature and satisfy its purposes, whilst contributing to the greater purpose of the whole, for the greater good of all. This is a very Aristotelian idea.
Practical Lesson #6: Participate in society
Aristotle is practical and he knows that to live well as a human being requires certain things: food, water, clothing, housing, education, protection, leisure, etc., etc. It is pretty much impossible for any one human being to achieve all these independently. We only achieve the conditions for human flourishing by working together to create a good society. Social organisation provides the means to our ends, whatever our ends may be. We need schools for education, doctors and hospitals for healthcare, banks and currency for material wealth, a military for protection, a legal system for the rule of law. We need drains and a department of sanitation to stop the shit building up in our streets. That collective effort of a good society is necessary for human beings to flourish, according to Aristotle; it is the only way we can achieve our purposes. And so we ought to acknowledge the necessity of a well-functioning human community. Human beings are not just rational animals, as if independent from one another, but political animals, necessarily connected. We are essentially animals that function best in well-functioning groups. The ideal human being lives within a community and would contribute to that community.
Clearly it’s not in our power to rule nations, unlike Alexander – or at least that’s true for most of us. So perhaps there is a question about how practical this lesson really is. How much can you do, after all, as one individual? Aristotle is not going to insist that you ought to have a go at becoming president/prime minister/monarch. But the recognition that we all depend on our society for the means of our continued survival and flourishing is not to be dismissed so lightly. We do need human society to stay alive, and we need that society to be good and not a harmful or broken society. Each of us has a responsibility to ensure that our society remains in good working order, in whatever way we can. We have a vested interest in this, because we need this, for ourselves and for our loved ones. It’s important that we don’t withdraw ourselves completely from our collective political lives. This would be true in all forms of government, but how much truer it is in a democracy when each of us is quite literally responsible for our own government. For our sakes, we need to take an active role in the political life of our society: we need to hold our leaders to account, and to do what we can at a local level to help our community flourish. If we ensure that our community flourishes – whether local, national, or global – then we give ourselves the best conditions for ourselves to flourish and fulfil whatever purposes we choose for ourselves.
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