How to read Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics

The beginning of our series on the Nicomachean Ethics, plus a small announcement at the end.

Today we’re beginning our read-along of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. To make it easy for you, here is the schedule we’ll be following:

• July 1: Introducing the work, Aristotle’s life, etc.

• July 8: Book I

• July 15: Book II

• July 22: Book III

• July 29: Book IV

• August 5: Book V

• August 12: Book VI

• August 19: Book VII

• August 26: Book VIII

• September 2: Book IX

• September 9: Book X

• September 16: Retrospective

So, I guess we can call this our summer of Aristotle, as we’ll be reading The Philosopher throughout the season.

Today, the goal is introduce you to Aristotle and to the particular work that we’re going to be reading. I also want to talk about the art of reading as it applies to Aristotle.

Who is Aristotle?

Aristotle – a figure so important that in medieval philosophy he is known simply as The Philosopher – was an ancient Greek philosopher, living between 384–322 BC. He is perhaps most famous for inheriting Plato’s Academy, making him something like Plato’s intellectual heir, but he also happened to be the tutor of Alexander the Great.

We have quite a few works by Aristotle; this collection is sometimes called the Corpus Aristotelicum, though that collection includes several works which we no longer believe to have been written by Aristotle (the speculation being that those works were products of Aristotle’s own school and library, the Lyceum, with some connection to Aristotle but not being a direct product).

Like many great minds of antiquity, Aristotle was interested in nearly everything. And so in addition to the ethical writings, which are our focus, he wrote on natural philosophy (Physics, Meteorology, History of Animals, etc.), logic (in a collection we call Organon), metaphysics (in the aptly named Metaphysics), and rhetoric (once again, the aptly named Rhetoric, but also Poetics).

There are six ethical and political writings in the Corpus Aristotelicum: Nicomachean Ethics, Great Ethics, Eudemian Ethics, On Virtues and Vices, Politics, and Economics. Great Ethics is a disputed work, possibly written by a student of Aristotle’s, while On Virtues and Vices is considered to be inauthentic. So that leaves us with two works specifically on ethics and two on politics, which for Aristotle are intimately related projects (as we will see early on in Nicomachean Ethics).

While we do have many works by Aristotle, in truth that is only about a third of what we believe he produced. Many of his works have been lost to time. Diogenes Laërtius claims that Aristotle wrote something like 150 titles.

Aristotle’s impact on philosophy is difficult to overstate. While it is Plato who is often regarded as the most influential and important philosopher, there is a case to be made that Aristotle has made more of a difference in intellectual history. His work was widely adopted in medieval Europe, serving as a philosophical basis for medieval science, philosophy, and theology. It was also taken up by Muslim intellectuals in the Arab world.

While Aristotle’s place of dominance has diminished – sometimes for very good reason – his ethical and political writings continue to be relevant and influential, especially with the rise of modern virtue ethics. And that is going to be our focus this summer: Aristotle on virtue.

Nicomachean Ethics

Compared to Eudemian Ethics, Nicomachean Ethics is a mature ethical work. Aristotle had by that point had time to think through some of the key concepts which we will be exploring – eudaimonia, teleology, etc. – and his discussions tend to be longer and more in-depth. (Some scholars dispute that Eudemian Ethics is an earlier work, but they can’t really dispute that Nicomachean Ethics is more comprehensive.)

Structurally, the parts of the Nicomachean Ethics are called books. So, the Nicomachean Ethics is referred to as a ‘work’ or a ‘title’ to avoid some confusion. I’ll likely just say it is a work, and that it comprises ten books. When we reference a passage, we don’t use page numbers. We reference the book, the chapter, and then the line. These lines were added by a later editor, and they are the standard way to cite Aristotle. It helps especially if we are working with a few different translations or editions.

Nicomachean Ethics is not an easy book to read; some writers have speculated that this was a technique employed by Aristotle to make you work at understanding. This would mean Aristotle was actually an obscurantist in the true sense of the term — he obscured the meaning of his work so that the reader would need to do some intellectual labor in order to really understand it. Let’s talk about what makes the book difficult.

First, Aristotle is highly systematic as a philosopher. This means that his work builds on itself. If you do not understand the first book of the work, then you won’t understand the latter books. It is important, then, to spend time in the early books really understanding how Aristotle thinks.

Second, Aristotle loves conditionals and hypotheticals. He will often say that if x were the case, and thus y and z followed, then we would say that a, and if b were also the case, then we can conclude that c. Understanding when this is a hypothetical he is merely entertaining in order to later dismiss and when this is actually a statement of his beliefs takes some work.

Third, Aristotle rarely defines his terms. This is not peculiar to him. Ancient writers tended to take the meaning of many of their terms for granted, and we just have to work out what they meant.

Fourth, Aristotle loves a run-on sentence. Maybe his writing does not technically violate our grammatical conventions, but he loves a sentence that never ends. Aristotle in this way was a spiritual German, and his way of writing tends to offend those of us who prefer what Orwell characterized as the plain style, where good writing is like a windowpane.

Aristotle is Never Wrong

When I was first learning my Aristotle, I took a seminar on the Nicomachean Ethics. The professor told us something which at the time I found scandalous: for the purposes of this class, Aristotle is never wrong.

The point here is not Aristotle cannot be wrong. My professor was laying down a rule for the kind of reading that we were going to do. Instead of being overly critical, negative readers, doing our best to find the holes in the arguments so that we could prove our intellectual superiority, we were going to do our best to understand how the Aristotelian mind worked. Doing that for an entire semester was incredibly helpful — and that is what we are going to do here this summer. For the purposes of this read-along, Aristotle is never wrong.

Well, at least until mid-September. When we do our retrospective, we can have a discussion about where we just don’t agree with Aristotle. But for a few months, as we read this together, do your best to really try and work out what Aristotle is saying, why he is saying it, and how we can make the argument stronger. This is the maximal version of the principle of charity, and while it is not a good way to approach all things, I find it is the best way to read the great works of philosophy for the first time. You will be a better reader, and will become a better thinker, because you did not simply dismiss what Aristotle said.

I think of this like a journey. We are climbing a high and difficult mountain. We want to make it to the top. That takes dedication and work — but it is easier to do when we work together.

I’m glad we’re traveling together.

An Announcement

Read-along posts on Walking Away are always free. That will never change. But I want to announce something adjacent to this read-along that is available to paid subscribers.

I’m going to host a Zoom call, roughly of about an hour, near the middle of July. This is a great time for us to talk about the Nicomachean Ethics so far. You can ask questions, and I’ll do my best to answer them. We’ll have a little back-and-forth, even. If that Zoom call goes well, I’ll host one at the end of August and September, too. This could become a monthly thing, even when it isn’t about a read-along.

More details will be coming soon. It may also not be on Zoom, as we might find a better platform. But ‘Zoom call’ is a pretty good generic description of what we’re going to do.

Why is this behind the paywall? Well, for one I don’t want to send a Zoom link to thousands of people — the odds of trolls finding it are too high. Keeping it for paid subscribers lets me handle the volume of people who might want to attend, and it makes having a discussion actually possible.