Aristotle's Way

How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

Long before Freudian psychoanalysis encouraged people to understand their primary urges as natural rather than morally contemptible, and before Ohioan psychiatrist Dr. W. Hugh Missildine asked us all to embrace our inner child in Your Inner Child of the Past (1963), Artstotle argued that happiness is not compatible with self-loathing. People who cannot respect themselves and believe in their own fundamental decency cannot even like themselves let alone other people. (p 34)

Until I read Edith Hall’s book, it hadn’t occurred to me how the philosophy of Aristotle, who died 300 years before Jesus was born, was the intellectual soil into which the teachings of Christ grew, as his followers traveled into Delphi, Athens, Corinth. I also hadn’t realized how foundational Aristotle’s philosophy was to the ideas framed in the United States’ constitution.

In this book, Hall suggests that basing your life on Aristotle’s ideas can make you happier. She says Aristotelian ethics encompass everything modern thinkers associate with subjective happiness: self-realization, finding “a meaning,” and the “flow” of creative involvement with life, or “positive emotion.” With stories and examples, she lays out how Aristotelian ethics informs happiness, human potential, decisions, communication, self-knowledge, intentions, love, community, leisure, mortality.

I particularly enjoyed the way she, and of course Aristotle, made me think. Gave me material for reflection, about my life, my decisions, and my place in the history of thought and philosophy. It challenged me to look at ideas I simply assumed, rather than be curious about their source.

And her final paragraph resonated with my growing sense of wonder.

He even proposes that the permanent process of coming into being which we see in the natural world - in humans, endless reproduction down the generations - is “God’s solution to the problem of creating an eternal being.’” God would have liked the universe to be eternal, and came as near as possible to creating an eternal universe “by making coming-to-be a perpetual process.’”This lends the entire history of the cosmos, including that of the human race and of each one of us as an individual, an ultimate unity and coherence: "‘The continuous coming-to-be of coming-to-be is the nearest approach to eternal being.”

Lovely.